-
Tech NewsNewsPolitician’s Zoom Background Can’t Hide Fact That He’s Actually Driving
Andrew Brenner, a state senator in Ohio, is getting some heat for driving while participating in a Zoom call earlier this week. The Ohio Senate is currently taking up a bill that would create additional penalties for distracted driving and a local newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch, pointed out the irony of the situation. But local … Continued
By Matt Novak -
ScienceHealthBaby Boomers Are Experiencing Greater Cognitive Decline Than Previous Generations, Study Finds
Baby boomers are experiencing a sharper drop in cognitive function as they age, relative to previous generations, according to a recent study. The findings not only suggest that boomers will be more likely to develop conditions like dementia than past cohorts, but future aging generations may be at a similar heightened risk. The study, published … Continued
By Ed Cara -
ScienceHealthResearchers Control Monkeys’ Decisions With Bursts of Ultrasonic Waves
High-frequency sound waves aimed at specific brain regions can influence monkey behavior, according to a new study. The finding complicates our conceptions of free will, but this research could yield new insights into the brain and new treatments for disorders such as addiction. New research published today in Science Advances suggests pulses of ultrasonic waves … Continued
-
ScienceHealthStudy Shows How Our Brains Replay Recent Experiences During Sleep
While we sleep, our brains are busy organizing fresh memories into long-term storage—or at least, that’s the theory. Intriguing new research is bolstering this assertion, with evidence that our brains replay the day’s experiences during sleep, in what is an integral part of the memory-storage process. In our brains, the conversion of short-term memories to … Continued
-
SciencePhysicsWe Are All Intuitive Physicists, Scientists Say
Most of us are pretty good at acting on the fly: swerving to avoid an obstacle in the road, ducking to keep from being hit, or reflexively catching a fly ball. We can do this because the brain is constantly running simulations of the physics involved as we scan our environment, according to a new … Continued
-
Tech NewsNew ‘Time Slice’ Theory Suggests You’re Not as Conscious as You Think You Are
Our conscious perception of the world feels like a continuous and uninterrupted flow, but a new study suggests that it’s actually more like the frames of a movie reel running through a projector. There’s still a lot we don’t know about consciousness and how it arises in the brain. Even though perception—such as vision and … Continued
-
Tech News
Watch Out Humans, Manta Rays May Be Self-Aware
Very few animals are capable of recognizing themselves in the mirror. New research suggests that manta rays are capable of this unique cognitive feat—a possible sign that these fish are self-aware. As children, many of us enjoyed playing in front of the mirror. We’d stick our tongues out at ourselves, make funny faces, or try … Continued
-
Tech NewsArtificial Intelligence
Everything You Know About Artificial Intelligence is Wrong
It was hailed as the most significant test of machine intelligence since Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess nearly 20 years ago. Google’s AlphaGo has won two of the first three games against grandmaster Lee Sedol in a Go tournament, showing the dramatic extent to which AI has improved over the years. That fateful … Continued
-
Tech News
These Researchers Made Their Own Horror Films To Study Memory in Apes
When Japanese researchers wanted to see if chimps could learn things from simply viewing a situation just once, they needed to create situations where apes would anticipate a noteworthy event. So they made their own horror films just for apes. The plots of King Kong Attack and Revenge of King Kong were rudimentary. There was … Continued
-
Tech News
Science Finally Explains Slackers
There’s a neurological reason for apathy and laziness, according to new research. Inefficient connections between certain areas of the brain may make it harder for some people to decide to act. Although inefficient neural connections don’t explain away everyone’s laziness, new research could shed some light on the kind of pathological, extreme apathy that sometimes … Continued
-
ScienceAnimals
Some Intriguing New Hints About What Ant Consciousness Is Really Like
They build cities. They farm. They make war. Ants do a lot of things that seem uncannily human — and yet they’re profoundly alien, part of a hive mind called a social organism. What does that feel like to each individual ant? Now a new scientific paper suggests that there is always doubt in the … Continued
