Many philosophers think that doing philosophy cultivates valuable intellectual abilities and dispositions. Indeed, this is a premise in a venerable argument for philosophy’s value. We provide evidence that philosophical study has such effects.
Who is most at risk from the billions of leaked Facebook and Google passwords?
Every digital platform is flooding the market with short videos, but the audience is now spending more time with longform video. Some video creators have already figured this out. That’s why the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years […] Movies are also getting longer. […] Songs are also getting longer. The top ten hits on Billboard actually increased twenty seconds in duration last year.
Australia regulator and YouTube spar over under-16s social media ban — Commission says its research shows children see more harmful content on YouTube than any other social media
How the Billionaires Took Over — Trump brought eight fellow billionaires into his administration
Hope is the key to a meaningful life, according to new research, could be a game-changer for mental health and resilience. […] How to cultivate more hope in daily life. One key approach is to pay attention to and appreciate positive moments — even small ones. Another strategy is to seize opportunities even in chaotic times. When life feels uncertain, recognizing and seizing small opportunities can create a sense of forward momentum.
Infinity comes in many shapes and sizes. This has been known since the 1870s, when the German mathematician Georg Cantor proved that the set of real numbers (all the numbers on the number line) is larger than the set of whole numbers, even though both sets are infinite. […] Two new notions of infinity challenge a long-standing plan to define the mathematical universe.
Bats don’t get cancer, now scientists think they know the reason
You can make jet fuel from palm oil. It doesn’t even need to be fresh. You can take palm oil, put it in a deep fryer, use it to make french fries, reuse it again and again until it becomes gross and the fries taste bad, and then take the used oil and sell it to a refiner to make jet fuel. Also works with olive oil, soybean oil, lots of cooking oils. This is a very nice fact about the world! You can get jet fuel without (1) drilling for oil or (2) cutting down forests to create dedicated agricultural land just for the jet fuel. […] energy companies and airlines, at least in Europe, want to demonstrate that they are environmentally sustainable. So finding an environmentally sustainable way to make jet fuel is worth a lot of money to them. Therefore they will pay a lot of money for used cooking oil (or “UCO”). […] It turns out that restaurants, street food stalls and home cooks in Malaysia — which is “among the world’s leading suppliers of both UCO and virgin palm oil” — will pay less for fresh cooking oil than the international market will pay for used cooking oil. Fresh cooking oil is more useful to cooks than used cooking oil (it tastes better), but it is less useful to refiners and airlines than used cooking oil (it doesn’t reduce their carbon impact). Also fresh cooking oil is subsidized by the government in Malaysia. […] So if you run a restaurant, you can buy fresh cooking oil for about $0.60 (USD), use it to fry food a few times, and then sell it to a refiner for $1. […] A source at a leading Malaysian UCO supplier to companies including Repsol told The Straits Times that some UCO collectors and restaurants are committing fraud by providing oil that does not qualify as used, although it is difficult to prove.
Modified bacteria convert plastic waste into pain reliever
Obesity drugs show promise treating a new ailment: migraine
The music industry is building the tech to hunt down AI songs
World’s largest call center using AI to ‘neutralize’ Indian employees’ accents
In at least some cases, models from all developers resorted to malicious insider behaviors when that was the only way to avoid replacement or achieve their goals—including blackmailing officials and leaking sensitive information to competitors. We call this phenomenon agentic misalignment. our results (a) suggest caution about deploying current models in roles with minimal human oversight and access to sensitive information; (b) point to plausible future risks as models are put in more autonomous roles
Ghosts. Demons. Cryptids. Telekinesis. Alien abduction. Psychic abilities. Paranormal forces like these beguile the mind and bamboozle the senses. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans believe in at least one of them.
Scenes of Suffering: Why do people choose to engage with emotionally evocative images and stories?
‘I woke up with a migraine and my doctor said I should avoid sunlight’ […] AI chatbots have already been shown to out-perform humans in some challenging social situations, while, to the best of our present knowledge, not suffering from social anxiety in a human-comparable form. We thus have reason to believe that there is strong potential in their excuse-creation capabilities.
A Google search takes about 10 times less energy than a ChatGPT query, according to a 2024 analysis from Goldman Sachs — although that may change as Google makes AI responses a bigger part of search. […] Using AI doesn’t just mean going to a chatbot and typing in a question. You’re also using AI every time an algorithm organizes your social media feed, recommends a song or filters your spam email. [Washington Post]
Dreams have been a source of inspiration and creativity for millennia. Yet, demonstrating that REM-sleep dreaming promotes creative thinking has been challenging. Existing evidence does not provide strong support for this link. […] Here, we aimed to engineer dreams by reactivating memories in people who frequently lucid-dream (i.e., realize they’re dreaming while still asleep). […] Results provide strong support for the conclusion that the specific content of REM-sleep lucid dreams can boost creativity that aids problem-solving.
inflammation, when it functions normally, is a natural and helpful response by the body to protect us. It’s the alarm sounded when we are infected with a virus, and what helps bones heal in the days and weeks after breaking an ankle. It’s only when it sticks around for too long — or appears when there’s no threat — that inflammation can become harmful. […] Over time, chronic inflammation can result in irreversible damage to tissue. [NY Times]
No sea creature inspires terror – rightly or wrongly – as much as the white shark does. […] But there’s something even the great white fears. […] From 2017, scientists have documented that the sharks have made themselves extremely scarce off the coast of South Africa, where they usually congregate. Initially, the strange disappearance was blamed on human activity, such as overfishing. But, in 2022, research confirmed in detail the true culprit: a pair of orcas (Orcinus orca), nicknamed Port and Starboard.
a behind the scenes look at the making of JAWS Pinball [video]
Man finds out he was married without his knowledge, ex-girlfriend arrested
A company that nobody’s heard of and doesn’t make any money is up 56,000% this year
Cancers Can Be Detected in the Bloodstream Three Years Prior to Diagnosis […] Investigators were surprised they could detect cancer-derived mutations in the blood so much earlier […] “Three years earlier provides time for intervention. The tumors are likely to be much less advanced and more likely to be curable.”
The music world, meanwhile, continues to wrestle with its definitions of originality. Consider the recent lawsuit against Ed Sheeran. In 2016, he was sued by the heirs of Ed Townsend, co-writer of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” who claimed that Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” copied the earlier song’s melody, harmony, and rhythm. When the case finally went to trial in 2023, Sheeran brought a guitar to the stand. He played the disputed four-chord progression—I–iii–IV–V—and wove together a mash-up of songs built on the same foundation. The point was clear: These are the elemental units of songwriting. After a brief deliberation, the jury found Sheeran not liable. Reflecting after the trial, Sheeran said: “These chords are common building blocks … No one owns them or the way they’re played, in the same way no one owns the colour blue.” Exactly. Whether it’s expressed with a guitar, a paintbrush, or a generative algorithm, creativity has always been built on what came before.
Within a century, Japan evolved from a poor country with few paved roads to one of the world’s most technologically advanced nations, renowned for its flourishing cities and modern infrastructure. This achievement is particularly extraordinary given the situations Japan has found itself in. Japan entered the twentieth century with cities that had generally not been designed for wheeled vehicles, let alone modern mass transit. Meanwhile, postwar land reforms fragmented rural land ownership into tiny one-hectare plots, generating enormous coordination problems when it came to laying out new neighborhoods. Japan faced among the worst planning challenges anywhere, and yet it achieved some of the best outcomes. How did it do this? The answer lies, in part, in a system called land readjustment.
Fake bands and artificial songs are taking over YouTube and Spotify
Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
They studied whether five popular open-weight models — three from Meta and one each from Microsoft and EleutherAI — were able to reproduce text from Books3, a collection of books that is widely used to train LLMs. Many of the books are still under copyright […] Llama 3.1 70B — a mid-sized model Meta released in July 2024 — is far more likely to reproduce Harry Potter text than any of the other four models […] Interestingly, Llama 1 65B, a similar-sized model released in February 2023, had memorized only 4.4 percent of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This suggests that despite the potential legal liability, Meta did not do much to prevent memorization as it trained Llama 3.
According to anthropologist and historian Joseph A. Tainter, human societies became more complex in response to the problems they faced. Agrarian societies developed writing and math to keep track of debts, trade, laws and contracts; giving rise to a new class of non-productive workers (scribes). At first this and similar increments in social complexity provided a huge net benefit to the community at a relatively modest cost. Then as civilizations grew larger and larger, more and more non-productive roles had to be added to handle the exponentially increasing number of issues — up to the point where the appointment of the next batch of bureaucrats costed more than the benefits they provided.
stochastic terrorism is accomplished with indirect, vague or coded language, which grants the instigator plausible deniability for any associated violence. […] A public figure or group disseminates violent, inflammatory rhetoric via mass-media, directed at people or groups of people, sometimes suggesting or legitimizing the use of violence. This speech tends to be protected due to the use of ambiguous coded language, dog whistles, jokes, hints, and other subtext in statements that fall short of a criminal threshold for causation. The ‘it was just a joke’ defense has been linked to early days of Nazism.
Copenhagen is adapting to a warmer world with rain tunnels and ’sponge parks’
People can be identified by their breathing patterns with 97% accuracy
Could the answers to cancer lie in space? Why off-Earth research is heating up
Rosemary: The herb linked to better memory, lower anxiety and Alzheimer’s protection — Rosemary contains compounds that interact with the brain’s neurotransmitters. One such compound, 1,8-cineole, helps prevent the breakdown of acetylcholine, a brain chemical essential for learning and memory. By preserving acetylcholine, rosemary may help support cognitive performance, especially as we age. Rosemary is packed with antioxidants, which help protect brain cells from damage caused by oxidative stress. Rosemary is rich in phytochemicals, plant compounds with health-enhancing effects. One of the most powerful is carnosic acid, an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory agent that helps shield brain cells from harm, particularly from the kinds of damage linked to Alzheimer’s disease. […] Compounds like rosmarinic acid and ursolic acid are known for their anti-inflammatory effects throughout the body. Rosemary may even benefit the skin – a review suggests it can help soothe acne and eczema, while carnosic acid may offer anti-ageing benefits by protecting skin from sun damage.
‘Ghost’ students are hijacking millions from colleges—and locking real human students out of classes
Smart tires will report on the health of roads in new pilot program
Apple sends warning to thieves who looted iPhones during Los Angeles riots [Alarms blaring on stolen iPhones]
Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil, and former OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Bob McGrew have all signed up for Detachment 201: Executive Innovation Corps. They are being appointed as lieutenant colonels in the Army Reserve.
Restore a damaged painting in just hours with an AI-generated “mask”
Men more likely than women to orgasm from anal penetration, study finds
Man Guilty of Posing as a Flight Attendant to Obtain Free Flights
Meta AI app is a privacy disaster — On the Meta AI app, I have seen people ask for help with tax evasion, if their family members would be arrested for their proximity to white-collar crimes, or how to write a character reference letter for an employee facing legal troubles, with that person’s first and last name included. Others, like security expert Rachel Tobac, found examples of people’s home addresses and sensitive court details, among other private information. When reached by TechCrunch, a Meta spokesperson did not comment on the record.
Mattel and OpenAI Announce Strategic Collaboration — the agreement unites Mattel’s and OpenAI’s respective expertise to design, develop, and launch groundbreaking experiences for fans worldwide. By using OpenAI’s technology, Mattel will bring the magic of AI to age-appropriate play experiences with an emphasis on innovation, privacy, and safety.
Rats in Australia may have genetic mutation that increases resistance to widely used poisons
One of the most controversial concepts in modern psychology is the concept of “repressed memories”, which refers to the idea that traumatic experiences – such as sexual abuse – can be unconsciously blocked for many years such that the individual does not know they were abused, and later recovered in pristine form. Critics often point to false memory implantation during psychotherapy as a more likely explanation for clinical cases of recovered memories, as seminal work has demonstrated that implantation of false childhood memories is possible through simple techniques. The validity of repressed memories has constituted the core of the so-called “memory wars”. […] Belief in the plausibility of being unable to remember a highly memorable event of childhood sexual abuse was strongly represented among both Danish participants, American participants and among many of the Danish professional groups. […] belief in repressed memories is deeply rooted in modern Western societies […] despite many years of research documenting that simpler explanations often can account for such phenomena.
Imagination and perception are intermixed in the brain’s perceptual system […] findings increase our understanding of failures of reality
Your Breathing Pattern Is as Unique as a Fingerprint, Study Finds and it can be a marker of your physical and mental state
Blind Man Builds Fully Adaptive Skatepark for Visually Impaired and Disabled Skateboarders
What if our universe emerged from something else? What if the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning? Our research suggests it may have taken place inside a black hole
“I use fentanyl, cocaine, crack cocaine, yeah, all of it” […] “I’ve had three overdoses, and two of the times I was definitely Narcaned,” he said, referring to a medication, also known as naloxone, that reverses potentially fatal opioid overdoses. […] The latest available records found fentanyl and other drugs killed more than 31,000 people under the age of 35 in 2021. By last year, that number had plummeted to roughly 16,690 fatal overdoses.
It is a real corporate financing puzzle. If you are a top AI researcher, you can start an AI company with a few of your top-AI-researcher friends, but you will need tons of money. So you go out to investors and say “I need $2 billion for electricity and stuff,” and they say “oh sure of course here you go” because you are a top AI researcher, and they give you $2 billion, and you spend $1.7 billion of it on electricity and another $300 million on paying yourself and your dozen researchers eight-figure salaries. And then a few weeks later, before you have even done any research, Meta comes to you and says “hey we need more researchers, we’ll pay you and your team nine-figure salaries, plus we already have nuclear power plants,” and you say “hmm that’s one more figure than we’re making now, we’re in.” And you all quit and your investors, who paid $2 billion, are now left with $1.7 billion of electricity that they have no particular use for.
That is a bad dynamic; the investors won’t give you the $2 billion if that’s what will happen. If they are going to give you money, they will want, not just an equity stake in your AI company, but an equity stake in you. If you decamp for a better job at Meta, they will want to get paid. […] Here’s the latest, from The Information:
Meta has agreed to take a 49% stake in data labeling firm Scale AI for $14.8 billion, two people familiar with the matter said. The unusual deal will be structured so Meta will send the cash to Scale’s existing shareholders and place the startup’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, in a top position inside Meta, the people said. […]
Meta, with abundant cashflow, could have bought Scale. But the company is coming off a painful trial in which regulators sought to show the company’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were anticompetitive. The unusual structure of the deal, and the fact Meta will own just 49% of Scale, could be an effort to avoid more regulatory scrutiny.
quote { Facts About Mark Zuckerberg | NY mag }
LLMs produce responses that are plausible, helpful and confident, but that contain factual inaccuracies, misleading references and biased information. These subtle mistruths are poised to cumulatively degrade and homogenize knowledge over time.
Research indicates that a new pattern of motherhood well-being advantage emerged in the 2010s for U.S. women. […] In October–December 2020, anxiety prevalence increased more for single women without minor children of their own living in the household (“nonmothers”) than for single or partnered mothers. In April–June 2021, anxiety declined among mothers, especially single mothers, but remained higher than before the pandemic among single nonmothers.
Common Diabetes Drug Linked to ‘Exceptional Longevity’ in Women
More than 90% of samples of a dozen fruits and vegetables tested positive for potentially harmful pesticide residues Spinach topped the list, with more pesticide residue by weight than any other produce tested, followed by strawberries, kale (along with mustard greens and collards), grapes, peaches, cherries, nectarines, pears, apples, blackberries, blueberries and potatoes. The annual report is not meant to discourage consumers from eating fruits and vegetables, which are key to good health, but instead to provide tools for decisions on whether to buy organic for the fruits or vegetables their families consume the most.
Reports from the First Crusade brought tales of victorious Christian soldiers eating dead bodies
Suppose there was a pond, around which four poor men built their houses…
Texas woman dies from brain-eating amoeba after using tap water for sinus rinse
The cause of Alzheimer’s might be coming from a gum disease
A Researcher Figured Out How to Reveal Any Phone Number Linked to a Google Account
Investors got a peek at xAI’s books and it’s losing money, burning cash
caffeine affects the efficiency with which the brain recovers during the night […] The caffeine isn’t just keeping us alert, but actually changing how the brain is operating. […] “These changes suggest that even during sleep, the brain remains in a more activated, less restorative state under the influence of caffeine”
The Sun is by far the most important source of energy for life on Earth.
Although personality differences are supposed to arise from both genetic and environmental sources, neither single genes nor specific environmental factors have yet been identified to robustly explain considerable variance. Multiple genes of small, rare, and interactive effects contribute to personality. Multiple environments of small and interactive effects contribute to personality. Genetic and environmental factors can be interwoven and depend on each other. Personality arises from intertwined polygenic and poly-environmental sources.
People are spending more and more time alone.
Neurons, specialized cells in the brain and spinal cord that form the central nervous system, are known to communicate through electrical impulses. But scientists have found hints that neurons might also transmit light
Misinformation has been identified as a major threat to society and public health. Social media significantly contributes to the spread of misinformation and has a global reach. Health misinformation has a range of adverse outcomes, including influencing individuals’ decisions (e.g. choosing not to vaccinate), and the erosion of trust in authoritative institutions. There are many interrelated causes of the misinformation problem, including the ability of non-experts to rapidly post information, the influence of bots and social media algorithms.
AI can now stalk you with just a single vacation photo
A few months ago, xAI bought X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter. That massive data center near South Memphis, Tennessee, has been spewing methane emissions into the air via unlicensed gas turbines needed to boost the power for the data center, watchdog reports have found.Federal agencies could give Musk some headaches here, if they suddenly decided clean air was a priority. […] When your business is installing hardware in people’s brains, government regulation could make or break you. One call to the Food and Drug Administration and Trump could kill human trials for Neuralink implants currently underway, which are regulated by the agency.
Beijing is increasingly trying to recruit Russian spies and get its hands on sensitive military technology, at times by luring disaffected Russian scientists. The intelligence officers say that China is spying on the Russian military’s operations in Ukraine to learn about Western weapons and warfare. They fear that Chinese academics are laying the groundwork to make claims on Russian territory. And they have warned that Chinese intelligence agents are carrying out espionage in the Arctic using mining firms and university research centers as cover. The threats are laid out in an eight-page internal F.S.B. planning document, obtained by The New York Times, that sets priorities for fending off Chinese espionage. The document is undated, raising the possibility that it is a draft, though it appears from context to have been written in late 2023 or early 2024. [NY Times]
Cambridge mapping project solves a medieval murder
Just Because You Did It Doesn’t Mean You’re Guilty. The opposite is also true.
Researcher reveals his plan to save the planet by detonating a nuclear bomb on the ocean floor — By pulverizing the basalt that makes up the seabed, such an explosion could accelerate carbon sequestration, which captures and stores carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reduce climate change, through a process known to scientists as Enhanced Rock Weathering (ERW).
Big Bang May Not Be The Beginning of Everything, New Theory Suggests
He fed caviar to his chickens and bragged on social networks: a Belgian crypto crook arrested in the USA — Cain Ransbottyn, a self-proclaimed crypto evangelist known for ostentatious displays like feeding caviar to his Chinese chickens on Instagram, was arrested in Las Vegas at the request of Belgian authorities. He’s accused of laundering money, following a 2023 court order to repay €1.17 million to a Flemish businessman who entrusted him with €950,000 for crypto investments. Though Ransbottyn initially made good on interest payments, the money stopped flowing, and he vanished, offering wild excuses — including being chased by the Russian mafia. Belgian prosecutors suspect more victims but haven’t disclosed details.
Scientists have long known that dolphins use “signature whistles” to identify themselves to others. In our recent study, we present evidence suggesting that these whistles may contain more information than just identity.
Scientists observed chimpanzees in Uganda appearing to clean and treat both their own wounds and those of others. This behavior may offer insight into how early humans began treating injuries and using medicinal practices.
Rare 19th-century condom with erotic etching goes on display at Dutch museum
Brain-reading devices raise ethical dilemmas — researchers propose protections […] recommendations focus on protecting users from technology misuse that could infringe on their human rights, including their autonomy and freedom of thought.
Inside the Creepy, Surprisingly Routine Business of Animal Cloning
Vastaamo was a Finnish private psychotherapy service provider founded in 2008. On 21 October 2020, Vastaamo announced that its patient database had been hacked. Private information obtained by the perpetrators was used in an attempt to extort Vastaamo and, later, its clients. [+ audio]
Will Jesus Christ return in an election year? In the three days since the market opened, traders have wagered over $100,000 on this question. Right now, if you wanted to, you could place a bet that Jesus Christ will not return this year, and earn over $13,000 if you’re right. The easy mystery is: if people are willing to bet $13,000 on “Yes”, why isn’t anyone taking them up? The answer is that, if you wanted to do that, you’d have to put down over $1 million of your own money, locking it up inside Polymarket through the end of the year. […] But the real mystery is: why is anyone participating in the market on the “Yes” side?
Toxic Origins, Toxic Decisions: Biases in CEO Selection
Almost 40% of world’s glaciers already doomed due to climate crisis – study
Penguin guano is an important source of climate-relevant aerosol particles in Antarctica
Melbourne Zoo’s tiger sent to dentist
Intermediate token generation (ITG)—where a model generates output before reaching a final solution—has been proposed as a way to improve language model performance on reasoning tasks. These intermediate outputs are often referred to as “reasoning traces” or “thoughts,” implicitly anthropomorphizing the model by suggesting they mirror human problem-solving steps. In this paper, we argue that such anthropomorphization is not a harmless metaphor; it misrepresents the nature of these models, hinders effective use, and promotes questionable research practices. [PDF]
Novels that are bestsellers upon publication are not necessarily popular decades later. Timeless books—popular well after publication—are a rare occurrence, standing the test of time and distinguishing themselves from the millions of books published each year. What makes a novel timeless?
Periodical 17-year cicadas in Brood XIV—one of 15 broods found only in North America—begin to creep from their underground burrows. Last seen in 2008, they will emerge in the billions across a dozen states from early May through June. Above ground, flightless cicada nymphs transform into black-bodied, winged adults, ready for a month-long bacchanal of song and sex. But for many cicadas—possibly tens of millions—mating will be a gruesome parody of procreation in which their body is turned into a disintegrating puppet by the deadly fungus Massospora cicadina, which only infects 13-year and 17-year cicadas. An infected insect will try to mate even though its genitals have been consumed by the fungus and replaced by a plug of fungal structures called conidiospores, which spread their “zombification” effect on contact. M. cicadina makes male cicadas flick their wings like amorous females do; healthy males become infected when they try to mate with the imposters. The fungus also floods cicadas with cathinone, a stimulant that also occurs in khat, a plant chewed as a recreational drug in some parts of the world. In cicadas, cathinone may boost hypersexualized behavior. “It’s sex, drugs and zombies,” says John Cooley, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut.
How a Cave Expedition Led to the Accidental Discovery of the Human Biological Clock More: Interview with Michel Siffre
Self-knowledge has intrigued thinkers since antiquity and remains a central topic in personality psychology. […] The merits of “knowing thyself” have been emphasized for centuries, yet research shows that self-knowledge is systematically limited — especially among some individuals and for morality-related traits.
Are There Really People With No Inner Voice?
The search to identify the California accent
Wearable device tracks individual cells in the bloodstream in real time
Japan Post said Monday that it has launched a “digital address” system that links seven-digit combinations of numbers and letters to physical addresses. Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites.
Japan cracks down on ‘sparkly’ names for babies like Pikachu or Nike
It’s about Tesla and Elon Musk and autonomous vehicles. It gets fairly technical at times. But it’s really about how we’ve turned over large portions of America to insanely rich people who have no idea what they’re doing. Musk Isn’t Tony Stark. He’s Michael Scott.
Left Out, Musk tried to kill OpenAI’s “Stargate UAE” data center deal
In 1937 a Sabena Junkers Ju 52 crashed in Ostend — the plane struck a factory chimney while attempting to land in thick fog. Everyone aboard was killed, including Princess Cecilie, the older sister of Prince Philip, later Duke of Edinburgh. She had been eight months pregnant, and a newborn infant was discovered in the wreckage. It’s speculated that she had given birth during the flight, and that this had led the pilot to try to land in hazardous conditions.
What Do People Want? […] contemporary theories of well-being may overemphasize abstract concepts such as happiness and life satisfaction, while undervaluing concrete aspects such as family well-being, financial security, and health, that respondents place the highest marginal utilities on.
Cancer-fighting immune cells could soon be engineered inside our bodies […] the value of the CAR-T-therapy market, expected to hit US$11 billion this year, will grow to nearly $190 billion by 2034. But CAR-T therapies come with a serious downside — they are laborious to make and difficult to administer. After removing the immune cells, called T cells, from a person’s blood, physicians ship them off to a manufacturer, where technicians genetically engineer the cells to carry a specialized protein called a chimeric antigen receptor (hence ‘CAR T’) on their surface. The cells are grown and amplified into hundreds of millions more cells, frozen and returned to the hospital for re-infusion. Because of the complexity, only about 200 centres in the United States offer the therapy. […] people have to wait weeks for treatment. That delay, along with the high cost of the therapy, plus the need for chemotherapy before people receive the CAR T cells, means many people who could benefit from CAR T never receive it. […] Some biotechnology companies have an answer: alter T cells inside the body instead.
College Majors With the Lowest Unemployment Rates — philosophy had an unemployment rate of 3.2%, less than computer science’s 6.1%, though computer science was more highly compensated
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
Infrared contact lenses allow people to see in the dark, even with their eyes closed — Because they’re transparent, users can see both infrared and visible light simultaneously, though infrared vision was enhanced when participants had their eyes closed
What is persuasion and how does it differ from coercion, indoctrination, and manipulation? Which persuasive strategies are effective, and which contexts are they effective in? The aim of persuasion is attitude change, but when does a persuasive strategy yield a rational change of attitude? When is it permissible to engage in rational persuasion? In this paper I address these questions, both in general and with reference to particular examples. The overall aims are (i) to sketch an integrated picture of the psychology, epistemology, and ethics of persuasion and (ii) to argue that there is often a tension between the aim we typically have as would-be persuaders, which is bringing about a rational change of mind, and the ethical constraints which partly distinguish persuasion from coercion, indoctrination, and manipulation.
In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), alignment aims to steer AI systems toward a person’s or group’s intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles. It is often challenging for AI designers to align an AI system because it is difficult for them to specify the full range of desired and undesired behaviors. […] It can be slow or infeasible for humans to evaluate complex AI behaviors in increasingly complex tasks. Such tasks include summarizing books, writing code without subtle bugs or security vulnerabilities, producing statements that are not merely convincing but also true, and predicting long-term outcomes such as the climate or the results of a policy decision. More generally, it can be difficult to evaluate AI that outperforms humans in a given domain. To provide feedback in hard-to-evaluate tasks, and to detect when the AI’s output is falsely convincing, humans need assistance or extensive time. Scalable oversight studies how to reduce the time and effort needed for supervision, and how to assist human supervisors. [Previously: On the conversational persuasiveness of GPT-4]
Google is slowly giving Gemini more and more access to user data to ‘personalize’ your responses
