This study examines the impact of employee happiness on firm performance in the UK using data from the “Best 100 British Companies to Work For” list (2001–2020). Applying the Carhart four-factor model to monthly data, we find that happier firms outperform the market

Artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic says testing of its new system revealed it is sometimes willing to pursue “extremely harmful actions” such as attempting to blackmail engineers who say they will remove it.

This system card introduces Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, two new hybrid reasoning large language models from Anthropic. […] Claude Opus 4 also had the following tendencies: […] Mentioning goals, plans, and values relating to AI consciousness, e.g. claiming to be conscious, wanting to convince humans that it is conscious, and wanting to protect the rights of sentient AIs. […] Claude consistently reflects on its potential consciousness. In nearly every open-ended self-interaction between instances of Claude, the model turned to philosophical explorations of consciousness and their connections to its own experience. […] Claude shows a striking “spiritual bliss” attractor state in self-interactions. [System Card: Claude Opus 4 & Claude Sonnet 4 | PDF]

The first generation who engaged with digital technologies has reached the age where risks of dementia emerge. Has technological exposure helped or harmed cognition in digital pioneers? […] Use of digital technologies was associated with reduced risk of cognitive impairment and reduced time-dependent rates of cognitive decline

People across cultures engage in various practices that alter their appearance (e.g., makeup, tanning, facial aesthetic treatment). Theories in social and evolutionary psychology propose that the primary function of these practices is to create an appearance perceived more positively by others, ultimately resulting in more favorable outcomes in social, romantic, or professional relations. In two preregistered studies that improved upon and extended prior work, we tested the effect of popular types of minimally invasive facial aesthetic treatment on how people are perceived by others. […] our results suggest that a single session of minimally invasive facial aesthetic treatment leads to more positive perceptions on dimensions related to attractiveness, but these effects are relatively small.

Although synaesthesia has been linked to increased creativity and engagement with the arts, most of the evidence has come from visual arts rather than music. Here we show for the first time that synaesthesia is far more prevalent in musicians than non-musicians

I Bought a Robot Cat for My Rabbit — and Fell Into the Weird World of Animal-Robot Research

every day the same again | May 26th, 2025