Lots of social scientists use Prolific.co to conduct massive surveys, by paying randos — Amazon-Turk-style — to give their responses to prompts. But this summer, they started to notice something… Read the rest of the article: Video by teenager on TikTok disrupts 4,600 survey studies
A 28-year-old Canadian woman had a stroke in a part of the brain known as the insular cortex—and after she recovered, she found she'd lost any sense of hunger. She… Read the rest of the article: Woman loses ability to feel hunger after a stroke
Since a) microchips and sensors are rapidly approaching the dimensions and cheapness of grey goo, and since b) tech firms are eager to collect data on basically anything about us,… Read the rest of the article: "Smart toilets" that monitor poop, pee and your "analprint"
It used to be that if you wanted to create a fake persona online, you swiped a photo from some hapless person's Facebook page. These days, though, fakers can create… Read the rest of the article: Detecting fake AI-generated faces by looking for irregular pupils
A group of scientists did a fascinating experiment: They proved that adding more plants to even tiny, mangy little urban greenspaces can massively boost their biodiversity. In 2016 they honed… Read the rest of the article: Improving tiny urban greenspaces causes huge boosts in insect life
Physicists with the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms have just announced new success with a particular style of quantum computer—a "programmable quantum simulator". In this architecture, they take supercold rubidium… Read the rest of the article: Mario animated using the supercooled atoms in a quantum computer
Tesla's autopilot feature has been in the news lately—propelled by stories about it causing crashes, sometimes fatal, when drivers rely on it too heavily. Now comes a tale of police… Read the rest of the article: Police use Tesla's autopilot to stop the car after drunk driver passes out
Noah Veltman took textual descriptions of several famous movies, then fed them to an AI — to have it generate a graphical version of what the text describes. The result:… Read the rest of the article: AI draws movie posters based on textual descriptions of films
The folks at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence just released an intriguing tool — "Paper to HTML", which lets you upload a scientific paper and it turns it into… Read the rest of the article: A web tool that converts PDF scientific papers into HTML
Over at Lifehacker, Claire Lower makes a surprisingly compelling case for pairing champagne with fast food: I've talked about Champagne's ability to make fatty food sing before, with a focus on… Read the rest of the article: On the joys of pairing champagne with McDonalds'
"Free Blockbuster" is like a chain of "little free libraries", except it circulates that noble medium of the home-video era: The VHS tape. You can drop one off or take… Read the rest of the article: "Free Blockbuster" boxes let you drop off, or take, a VHS movie
Apparently Roomba owners who also own dogs have long encountered a problem: If the dog poops on the floor, their helpful robot vacuum rides right over it and smears it… Read the rest of the article: iRobot built over 100 models of dog poop to train Roomba's visual AI
"Non-line-of-sight imaging" is the technique of shining light in a direction and measuring all the ways it bounces off objects to determine their rough shape — including ones the person… Read the rest of the article: A laser camera that can see an entire room through a keyhole
The "milk crate challenge" erupted a few weeks ago on Tik Tok; it consists of people attempting to ascend and descend a pyramidal staircase made of milk crates. Behold …… Read the rest of the article: The brutal physics of the "milk crate challenge"
"Jazzkeys" was created by Plan8, a design firm that does music/sound for brands, film and interactive what-have-yous. It's a word processor that plays music as you type — each keypress… Read the rest of the article: A word processor that improvises keyboard jazz while you type
A new scientific paper finds that warm-blooded animals are evolving larger beaks, legs, ears and tails, as they try to adapt to a warmer planet. "Appendages have an important, but… Read the rest of the article: Animals are "shapeshifting" to cope with climate change
When the US firm Astra tried to launch its latest rocket up to low-earth orbit, one of the engines failed on the launch pad — so instead of going up,… Read the rest of the article: Malfunctioning rocket takes off sideways
Growing up in the 70s and early 80s, I was morbidly fascinated by Grimace, the McDonaldland character. I'm old enough to remember when Grimace was a) an evil character who… Read the rest of the article: McDonald's manager explains that Grimace is "a taste bud"
GTP-3, the deep-learning language model created by OpenAI that's eerily good at writing human-sounding text, was trained on data that ended in October 2019. That means it hasn't been trained… Read the rest of the article: GPT-3 is able to accurately predict a lot about COVID-19
It seems that all the time we've spent staring at ourselves in Zoom during the pandemic is affecting our perception of ourselves. When plastic surgeons began reopening for business in… Read the rest of the article: Plastic surgeons say the pandemic has caused "Zoom dysmorphia"
