Data Attack - It's Personal

Perennial public service announcement that all your data are belong to us:

ParkMobile app update: Deadline for $32.8M data breach settlement is here

Mar 2025, nj.com

https://www.nj.com/news/2025/03/parkmobile-app-update-deadline-for-328m-data-breach-settlement-is-here.html

As many as 21 million people could be eligible for the settlement, which stems from a data breach that happened in 2021.

ParkMobile, popular app used by many Jersey Shore beach towns that collect parking fees, agreed to the $32.8 million settlement to resolve claims “relating to an unknown actor’s unauthorized access to the Personal Information of ParkMobile App users,” the settlement website said.

Mostly unrelated image credit: AI Art - Sandwich Man 2 - 2024

Ex-cop admits hacking into social media accounts of nearly 20 women, distributing naked pics, officials say

Mar 2025, nj.com

https://www.nj.com/burlington/2025/03/ex-cop-admits-hacking-into-social-media-accounts-of-nearly-20-women-distributing-naked-pics-officials-say.html

A former Mount Laurel police officer admitted this week to hacking into multiple women’s social media accounts and distributing their nude photos, authorities said.

The investigation began in September 2022. He was a rookie officer with the Mount Laurel Police Department at the time, was arrested on Oct. 21, 2022 and charged with three counts of computer crime, invasion of privacy and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child, investigators said.

As the investigation continued, 18 more women were found to be victimized by him, police said. Investigators determined that all the victims had a student email account through Rowan College in Burlington County, the office said.

Detectives learned that he illegally accessed approximately 5,000 email accounts associated with the college, authorities said. He hacked the accounts from his own personal devices while on duty as a patrol officer, according to the release.

Nothing to See Here

Scientists clarify the neuronal basis of the mathematical concept of 'zero'

Sep 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-09-scientists-neuronal-basis-mathematical-concept.html

"Unlike other numbers such as one, two or three, which represent countable quantities, zero means the absence of something countable and at the same time still has a numerical value."

They showed neurosurgical patients, who had had hair-thin microelectrodes inserted into their temporal lobes at the UKB in preparation for surgery, numerical values from zero to nine. The numerical values were shown as Arabic numerals on the one hand and as sets of dots on the other—including an empty set.

"Meanwhile, we were able to measure the activity of individual nerve cells and actually found neurons that signaled zero. Such neurons responded to either the Arabic numeral zero or the empty set, but not to both."

"So at the neuronal level, the concept of zero is not encoded as a separate category 'nothing,' but as a numerical value integrated with other, countable numerical values at the lower end of the number line." 

"Despite this integration, the empty set is encoded differently from other numbers at the neuronal population level, especially in the case of point sets. This could explain why the recognition of the empty set also takes longer at the behavioral level than for other small numbers."

FYI - The department of epileptology is for studying epilepsy.

via the Department of Epileptology at University Hospital Bonn, the University of Bonn and the University of Tübingen: Esther F. Kutter et al, Single-neuron representation of nonsymbolic and symbolic number zero in the human medial temporal lobe, Current Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.08.041

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.08.041

Image credit: AI Art - Tunnel of Numbers - 2025

On Making Music for Entropy's Sake

The above image comes from research by the music writer Ted Gioia, and is described in more detail below. 

As for the first article we see here, this question starts us off - are these scientists measuring the "natural" changing preference in our culture for less complex music, or are they simply measuring market forces? (A crippled market of course, which has no more growth potential, and which is cannibalizing itself, as described below.)

Using network science, study shows music has become less complex

Jan 2025, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-01-network-science-music-complex.html

Measuring the complexity of a piece of music - They began by thinking of each note as a node on a network and then connecting them using edges if they came directly one after another, then thickening the edges based on the number of times a single note transitioned to another. The more complex the series of notes, the more complex the music.

20,000 songs later, they found that classical music was more complex than modern music, with the exception of jazz.

The researchers also found that music of all kinds has slowly become simpler as time has passed, even classical and jazz. They were not able to explain why but suggested that technical advancements allowing more people to participate in composing songs may play a role. [I wonder how they cancel industry effects like consolidation of companies and risk avoidance, a la Ted Gioia)

 

via Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Padova: Niccolo' Di Marco et al, Decoding Musical Evolution Through Network Science, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2501.07557

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.07557

Contrasting the above research, which comes from culturally hermetic academia, with the research below, which comes from a music writer who's also a musician and a bit more nuance in how the actual world of music works:

The Music Business is Healthy Again? Really?

Feb 2025, Ted Gioia

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-music-business-is-healthy-again

Instead of focusing on exciting new music, Spotify prefers to serve up AI slop (acquired on the cheap), fake artists, and lots of old songs.

This is a stark contrast to video streaming—where Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Disney, and others invest tens of billions of dollars annually in creating new films and series.

Music streamers don’t like creating content (that word, ugh!). Other people need to make those risky investments—not the streaming platform.

And he goes on to show announcements that both Warner Music and Universal have signed recently new deals with Spotify, without disclosing any financial details. His solution?

"Instead of bowing and scraping, they should cut off Spotify and launch their own streaming platform—run as a cooperative of labels and artists."

And lastly, he says even Spotify execs are selling their shares.

'Work flow' music designed to improve performance does just that

Feb 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-music.html

I hear "functional fragrance" but for music:

196 adult volunteers listened to various types of music and office background noise while conducting work tasks. The only type of music that helped performance was work flow, and it improved reaction time and mood. 

"Their work also shows that the people behind the creation of work flow music have done their homework in identifying the sounds and arrangements that can take attentional focus away from the music toward the task at hand. Such music, they note, tends to have a strong rhythm, simple tonality, moderate dynamism and broad spectral energy."

"The people" they're talking about are probably AI programs bought by a streaming company. At least that's my suspicion, so I looked. 

The first was “work flow” music sampled from a synonymous playlist on a music therapy app (spiritune.com). On spiritune's website, I read "Our scientific advisors and composers work together to deliver compositions optimized and adapted around those musical characteristics to help create tracks that work harder for your health." And when I hear "scientific advisor" I think "IP Thief Chief".

The second type was “deep focus” music, sampled from a synonymous playlist on a music streaming platform, and that would be Spotify. 

(Note: Neither work flow nor deep focus music had lyrics; and two additional audio conditions used were the “Hot 100” playlist published by an American music magazine, and “calm office noise”sampled from a synonymous sound generator on a website offering noise stimulation.)

via Department of Neuroscience at Georgetown University Medical Center, Stanford School of Medicine and Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Department of Psychology and Music and Audio Research Laboratory at NYU: Joan Orpella et al, Effects of music advertised to support focus on mood and processing speed, PLOS ONE (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0316047

https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316047

Post Script: "participants were recruited online using Amazon Mechanical Turk"; always good to remember who butters the bread.  

Further Reading: Muzak is Back

https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2025/02/muzak-is-back.html

Words on File

First we have to recognize these behemoths of science with great names, the TESSERACT and the Stellarator:

TESSERACT is a dark matter detector - Transition-Edge Sensors with Sub-EV Resolution And Cryogenic Targets

The Stellarator is a fusion reactor, but it's not a proper name, it's a type of reactor.

How 'Conan the Bacterium' combines simple metabolites to withstand extreme radiation

Dec 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-conan-bacterium-combines-simple-metabolites.html

Conan the Bacterium - dubbed for its extraordinary ability to tolerate the harshest of conditions, Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand radiation doses thousands of times higher than what would kill a human—and every other organism for that matter.

via Northwestern University and the Uniformed Services University: Brian M. Hoffman et al, The ternary complex of Mn2+, synthetic decapeptide DP1 (DEHGTAVMLK), and orthophosphate is a superb antioxidant, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2417389121

https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2417389121

Image credit: AI Art - Instructions - 2025. Hard to resist a picture of a piece of paper with instructions written on it, but by a computer that doesn't speak English, or know what instructions are, or a piece of paper for that matter. 

Solitude is better for your health when it's not too intense, research suggests

Dec 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-12-solitude-health-intense.html

I'm only here for this phrase:

The Matrix of Solitude - The researchers built a matrix of solitude that includes a base level - no interaction with people - and a total level, which refers to being inaccessible to others and not engaging with media. 

"If you have a positive attitude toward solitude—because you use it to restore energy and know that you will be able to connect with people later—then choosing solitude will probably make you feel better. But if you choose solitude because of a negative attitude toward social interaction—because you don't want to talk to people—it will probably make you feel worse."

via Ohio University and Ohio State - Morgan Quinn Ross et al, The tradeoff of solitude? Restoration and relatedness across shades of solitude, PLOS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0311738

https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0311738

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.matt.2024.11.025

Comfortable materials use friction to generate power when worn

Jan 2025, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-01-comfortable-materials-friction-generate-power.html

Tunable Haptic Energy Harvester aka Amphiphiles - used in fabrics to prevent chaffing, but also have electronic properties that allow them to "donate" electrons, resulting in a material that was both comfortable and capable of generating electricity through friction produced by rubbing against human skin or other materials.

via North Carolina State U: Pallav Jani et al, Compressing slippery surface-assembled amphiphiles for tunable haptic energy harvesters., Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr4088.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adr4088

New CAR-T cell therapy 'ALA-CART' shows promise for hard-to-treat cancers

Mar 2025, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-03-car-cell-therapy-ala-cart.html

ALA-CART - adjunctive LAT-activating CAR-T cells optimizes CAR-T cells to more effectively eliminate cancer cells that have been able to hide from traditional CAR-T cells

via Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus: Catherine Pham-Danis et al, Restoration of LAT activity improves CAR T cell sensitivity and persistence in response to antigen-low acute lymphoblastic leukemia, Cancer Cell (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.ccell.2025.02.008

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ccell.2025.02.008

Meteorological Mayhem

Running a planet gets harder every year. 

Solar geoengineering could save 400,000 lives a year

Dec 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-solar-geoengineering-year.html

Stratospheric aerosol injection for 1 degree of cooling could save 400,000 lives, outweighing deaths caused by solar geoengineering's direct health risks from air pollution and ozone depletion by a factor of 13.

via Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy, Princeton, University of Chicago: Anthony Harding et al, Impact of solar geoengineering on temperature-attributable mortality, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2401801121

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-solar-geoengineering-year.html

Image credit: AI Art - Money Gets Swept Away in a Tornado - 2025

Enhanced weathering could transform US agriculture for atmospheric CO₂ removal

Feb 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-weathering-agriculture-atmospheric.html

This is the flip side to the stratospheric injection style geoengineering:

Enhanced weathering - adding crushed basalt to soils using existing agricultural infrastructure; the basalt reacts with CO2, taking it out of the air; it also could improve air quality by interacting with the soil nitrogen cycling processes to reduce the formation of ozone and fine particulate matter.

via Leverhulme Center for Climate Change Mitigation, University of Sheffield: David J. Beerling et al, Transforming US agriculture for carbon removal with enhanced weathering, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08429-2

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08429-2

Ocean-surface warming has more than quadrupled since the late-1980s, study shows

Jan 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-ocean-surface-quadrupled-late-1980s.html

Ocean temperatures were rising at about 0.06 degrees Celsius per decade in the late 1980s, but are now increasing at 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade, a quadrupling.

Global ocean temperatures hit record highs for 450 days straight in 2023 and early 2024. Some of this warmth came from El Niño, a natural warming event in the Pacific.

When scientists compared it to a similar El Niño in 2015–16, they found that the rest of the record warmth is explained by the sea surface warming up faster in the past 10 years than in earlier decades; 44% of the record warmth was attributable to the oceans absorbing heat at an accelerating rate.

Expect more warming ... 

via University of Reading: Quantifying the acceleration of multidecadal global sea surface warming driven by Earth's energy imbalance, Environmental Research Letters (2025). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/adaa8a

https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/adaa8a

Scientists highlight alarming rise in marine heat waves worldwide

Mar 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-scientists-highlight-alarming-marine-worldwide.html

One group of researchers found that the number of such heat waves in 2023–2024 was 240% higher than any other year in recorded history.

(fyi: "Prior research has also shown that abnormally high water temperatures can lead to dolphins and whales swimming closer to shore than normal".)

via Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, Climate Change Research Centre, Centre for Marine Science & Innovation and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, University of New South Wales: Kathryn E. Smith et al, Ocean extremes as a stress test for marine ecosystems and society, Nature Climate Change (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-025-02269-2

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02269-2

Extreme ocean heat does not mean climate change is accelerating

Mar 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-extreme-ocean-climate.html

As opposed to being a sign that our models are all wrong and we absolutely helpless, they say it could be a 500-year event, but according to our current climate not the historical climate, which means it could become more like a 100-year event. 

via University of Bern: Jens Terhaar et al, Record sea surface temperature jump in 2023–2024 unlikely but not unexpected, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08674-z

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08674-z

Post Consumerist Paradise

With the Shopocalypse imminent, the Church of Stop Shopping is the only church to gain congregants in the past ten years. 

When TikTok's underconsumption trend meets festive excess

Dec 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2p784ppzqo

There is a topic trending on a popular social media platform that celebrates "underconsumption", i.e., buying fewer unnecessary things and making the products you already own go further.

(This is around the Christmas holiday btw, 10% of the United States economy.)

"Trying to reduce consumption goes against the norms of consumer culture."

That is all.

Image credit: AI Art - Multivitamins - 2025

Economic inequality is a powerful predictor of democratic erosion

Jan 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-economic-inequality-powerful-predictor-democratic.html

Economic inequality is one of the strongest predictors of where and when democracy erodes—even wealthy and longstanding democracies are vulnerable if they are highly unequal.

via University of Chicago: Eli G. Rau et al, Income inequality and the erosion of democracy in the twenty-first century, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2422543121

https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2422543121

Making Materials Progress

Make it stop: 

'Living' ceramics utilize bacteria for gas sensing and carbon capture

Dec 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-ceramics-bacteria-gas-carbon-capture.html

The work involved first 3D printing stacked, ceramic, spiral structures that could stand on their own. The structures were printed with pits on their outer surfaces to give bacteria a place to live. The larger pits were used as a way to channel nutrients to the bacteria.

To further ensure the bacteria could feed for an extended period of time, they set the structures in shallow pools of nutrient solutions. As the water in the solutions evaporated, the nutrients were pulled up to the pits containing the nutrients via capillary action. The bacteria were then allowed to multiply, filling the pores that had been designed for them. Testing showed they could survive without further nutrients for up to two weeks.

The research team used different types of bacteria for different purposes—with photosynthetic cyanobacteria, for example, the structure could serve as a CO2 extraction device, pulling the gas from the air. They also tried Escherichia coli and found that they made the structure a formaldehyde detector.

via ETH Zurich: Alessandro Dutto et al, Living Porous Ceramics for Bacteria‐Regulated Gas Sensing and Carbon Capture, Advanced Materials (2024). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202412555

https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adma.202412555

Self-adjusting shading system mimics pine cones for energy-autonomous weather response

Jan 2025, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-01-adjusting-mimics-cones-energy-autonomous.html

"We are achieving a shading system that opens and closes autonomously in response to changes in the weather, without the need for operational energy or any mechatronic elements. The bio-material structure itself is the machine."

It's based on pine cones. In high humidity, the cellulosic materials absorb moisture and expand, causing the printed elements to curl and open. Conversely, in low humidity, the cellulosic materials release moisture and contract, causing the printed elements to flatten and close.

via University of Stuttgart Institute for Computational Design and Construction: Tiffany Cheng et al, Weather-responsive adaptive shading through biobased and bioinspired hygromorphic 4D-printing, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-54808-8

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-54808-8

Unoccupied housing in China's urban areas emitting massive amounts of carbon, study finds

Mar 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-unoccupied-housing-china-urban-areas.html

Prior research has shown that by 2021, approximately 17% of homes built in cities in China were unoccupied. Some in the field have suggested that the number has only grown since then, to between 20 and 65 million unoccupied units. This new research found that approximately 17.4% of all new residential units built between 2001 and 2018 have never been occupied. 

The total the team came up with was 55.81 million tons of carbon emissions solely due to the unoccupied housing units, which they note represent approximately 6.9% of China's total residential emissions. (One source of emissions is the footprint of the materials, and the second comes from heating and cooling, because most of the units are apartment buildings with central heating and cooling.)

via Tsinghua University: Hefan Zheng et al, Unused housing in urban China and its carbon emission impact, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-57217-7

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-57217-7

Captain Tying Knots

With all the topological mention these days, we have to ask - whatever happened to knots?

String figures shed light on cultural connections and the roots of mathematical reasoning

Dec 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-figures-cultural-roots-mathematical.html

String figure games (like cat's cradle or jacob's ladder?) involve the manipulation of a loop of string with the fingers to create complex patterns. The researchers analyzed 826 string figures from 92 cultures around the world. They found 83 recurring designs. The results show that certain figures are globally prevalent. In certain cases, this suggests ancient cultural origins potentially extending back millennia. 

The researchers applied mathematical knot theory to develop a computational method to create a DNA-like symbolic representation of each string figure. This enables the cross-cultural comparison of string figures and the construction of their "family tree."

via University of Helsinki, Aarhus University, National Museum of Denmark and Seattle University: Roope O. Kaaronen et al, A global cross-cultural analysis of string figures reveals evidence of deep transmission and innovation, Journal of The Royal Society Interface (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2024.0673

https://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2024.0673

Image credit: Fingers, not bad, not good enough. AI Art - Let Go - 2025

The Graphene Zoo

 

From its slightly accidental inception 20 years ago, graphene has now turned into a large branch on the tree of technogenetic life.

Decoding 2D material growth: White graphene insights open doors to cleaner energy and more efficient electronics

Jan 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-decoding-2d-material-growth-white.html

White Graphene - the name for hexagonal boron nitride (where you blast out some of the carbon atoms from graphene and fill them with boron nitride instead)

via University of Surrey and Graz University of Technology: Anthony J. R. Payne et al, Unravelling the Epitaxial Growth Mechanism of Hexagonal and Nanoporous Boron Nitride: A First‐Principles Microkinetic Model, Small (2025). DOI: 10.1002/smll.202405404

https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/smll.202405404

Image credit: Simulated photon orbits inside hexagonal boron nitride - Fogler group UC San Diego - 2023

Graphyne's transformation: A new carbon form with potential for electronics

Feb 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-graphyne-carbon-potential-electronics.html

Graphyne - It's not graphene, it's not carbon like diamonds with its 3-D lattice, it's not like graphite with its 2-D lattice, and it's not graphene with it's 1-D 2-D lattice. It's a 1-D 2-D 3-D lattice. Got it?

via Case Western Reserve University: Ali E. Aliev et al, A planar-sheet nongraphitic zero-bandgap sp2 carbon phase made by the low-temperature reaction of γ-graphyne, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2413194122

https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2413194122

Synthetic diamond with hexagonal lattice outshines the natural kind with unprecedented hardness

Feb 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-synthetic-diamond-hexagonal-lattice-outshines.html

Synthetic hexagonal diamonds - heating graphene samples to high temperatures while inside a high-pressure chamber. By adjusting the parameters of their setup, the researchers found they could get the graphene to grow into a synthetic diamond with hexagonal lattices.

via Umeå University and materials scientists and engineers affiliated with several institutions in China such as Jilin University: Desi Chen et al, General approach for synthesizing hexagonal diamond by heating post-graphite phases, Nature Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-025-02126-9

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41563-025-02126-9

Olympicene molecular chains create quantum spin systems with spintronics applications

Mar 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-olympicene-molecular-chains-quantum-spintronics.html

Olympicenes - open-shell nanographenes (shaped like the Olympics logo)

via Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics: Chenxiao Zhao et al, Spin excitations in nanographene-based antiferromagnetic spin-1/2 Heisenberg chains, Nature Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-025-02166-1

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41563-025-02166-1

Headlines From the Front Lines

It may be April Fool's, but the headlines are real.

Iberian nailed head ritual was more complex than expected, isotope analysis reveals

Feb 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-iberian-ritual-complex-isotope-analysis.html

Not trying to be anti-literacy here, it's just that sometimes the headline is all you need. (Although this particular headline below requires the accompanying image.)

via Autonomous University of Barcelona: Rubén de la Fuente-Seoane et al, Territorialisation and human mobility during the Iron Age in NE Iberia: An approach through Isotope Analyses of the Severed Heads from Puig Castellar (Barcelona, Spain) and Ullastret (Girona, Spain), Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2025.105035

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2025.105035

Image credit: Iberian nailed head found at Ullastret, MAC-Ullastret a De Prado, 2015

Antioxidant carbon dot nanozymes alleviate depression in rats by restoring the gut microbiome

Sep 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-09-antioxidant-carbon-dot-nanozymes-alleviate.html

Some headlines just make me feel like how a cracked windshield can become the the quintessential heavy metal band name font, but for like a mad scientist type of science thing. 

via Henan Joint International Research Laboratory of Nanomaterials for Energy and Catalysis at Xuchang University: Huimin Jia et al, Antioxidant Carbon Dots Nanozymes Alleviate Stress-induced Depression by Modulating Gut Microbiota, Langmuir (2024). DOI: 10.1021/acs.langmuir.4c02481

https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.langmuir.4c02481

Google reacts angrily to report it will have to sell Chrome

Nov 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4g193qezno

'Alzheimer's in dish' model shows promise for accelerating drug discovery

Nov 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-11-alzheimer-dish-drug-discovery.html

(Alzheimer's isn't funny but Alzheimer's-in-a-dish is funny.)

via Massachusetts General Hospital: Yeganeah, PN et al. Integrative Pathway Analysis across Humans and 3D Cellular Models Identifies the p38 MAPK-MK2 Axis as a Therapeutic Target for Alzheimer's Disease, Neuron (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2024.10.029.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2024.10.029

Topological quantum processor uses Majorana zero modes for fault-tolerant computing

Feb 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-topological-quantum-processor-majorana-modes.html

It's got all the words - majorana fermion, topological things, and quantum computers - but I still don't buy it because it's Microsoft and they lie about shit all the time. In fact, I'm going to assume that specifically because it's a Microsoft press release, that it was engineered to have all these words on purpose. Shall we say, a kind of artificial headline generator trained on hype words more than the actual work that was done. 

(Actual scientists working in academia are not convinced, by the way.)

via UC Santa Barbara and Microsoft Station Q: David Aasen et al, Roadmap to fault tolerant quantum computation using topological qubit arrays, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2502.12252

https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2502.12252

Biohybrid hand uses sushi-like rolls of lab-grown human muscle to move objects

Feb 2025, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-02-biohybrid-sushi-lab-grown-human.html

via University of Tokyo: XINZHU REN et al, Biohybrid hand actuated by multiple human muscle tissues, Science Robotics (2025). DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adr5512.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.adr5512

Engineers develop a fully 3D-printed electrospray engine that can power tiny satellites

Feb 2025, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-02-fully-3d-electrospray-power-tiny.html

via MIT: Hyeonseok Kim et al, High‐Impulse, Modular, 3D‐Printed CubeSat Electrospray Thrusters Throttleable via Pressure and Voltage Control, Advanced Science (2025). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202413706

https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/advs.202413706

Does It Compute

AKA All Computers All the Time

Right now a computer is a box that sits on your desk. It's plugged in. Maybe it's a little box, one you keep in your pocket. That one's not plugged in, but it does need power. Soon, the computer will not be a thing. Instead, all things will be a computer. Maybe it's better to say that all things will compute. And like instead of saying 'there's an app for that' we might hear instead 'does it compute'? Like, "Can you pass me the paper towel?" "Does it compute?" Or, "Hey I just got a new haircut." "But does it compute?" 

First - The Fiber Computer:

Fiber computer allows apparel to run apps and 'understand' the wearer

Feb 2025, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-02-fiber-apparel-apps-wearer.html

It's an autonomous programmable computer in the form of an elastic fiber.

The fiber computer contains a series of microdevices, including sensors, a microcontroller, digital memory, Bluetooth modules, optical communications, and a battery, making up all the necessary components of a computer in a single elastic fiber.

"Our bodies broadcast gigabytes of data through the skin every second in the form of heat, sound, biochemicals, electrical potentials, and light, all of which carry information about our activities, emotions, and health. Unfortunately, most, if not all, of it gets absorbed and then lost in the clothes we wear."

via MIT, RISD, Brown, Stanford, Soldier Nanotechnologies: Yoel Fink, A single-fibre computer enables textile networks and distributed inference, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08568-6. 

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08568-6

Image credit: AI Art - Starship Doctor - 2023

Materials can remember a sequence of events in an unexpected way

Jan 202,5 phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-materials-sequence-events-unexpected.html

Material memory is like wrinkles on a crumpled piece of paper. These memories are stored in disordered solids in which the arrangement of particles seems random but actually contains details about past deformations. Materials should not be able to form return-point memory when the force only occurs in one direction. For example, a bridge might sag slightly as cars drive over it, but it doesn't curve upwards once the cars are gone.

The researchers boiled down the components of the system—such as the particles in a solid or the microscopic domains in a magnet—into abstract elements called hysterons. "Hysterons are elements of a system that may not immediately respond to external conditions, and can stay in a past state."

The hysterons in the model interact either in a cooperative way, where a change in one encourages a change in the other, or in a non-cooperative "frustrated" way, where a change in one discourages a change in the other. Frustrated hysterons are the key to forming and recovering a sequence in a system with asymmetric driving.

"We think this is a way to design artificial systems with this special kind of memory, starting with the simplest mechanical systems not much more complicated than a bendy straw, and hopefully working up to something like an asymmetrical combination lock."

via Penn State: Chloe Lindeman et al, Generalizing multiple memories from a single drive: The hysteron latch, Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr5933

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adr5933

Soap's maze-solving skills could unlock secrets of the human body

Jan 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-soap-maze-skills-secrets-human.html

"Surfactants—the molecules found in soap—can naturally find its way through a maze"

We're talking about things acting like people. Imagine discovering that chairs can figure out how to best position themselves in a theater. Or the straps on your backpack can figure out the best length for positioning the pack on your back depending on the weight and the way you walk etc. Your pencil can figure out how to write a better sentence for convincing your roommate to do the dishes. I'm just trying to imagine what this all means.  

"When we put soap into a liquid filled maze, the natural surfactants already present in the liquid interact, creating an omniscient view of the maze, so the soap can intuitively find the correct path, ignoring all other irrelevant paths. This behavior occurs due to very subtle but powerful physics where the two types of surfactants generate tension forces that guide the soap to the exit."

Yes, they called soap bubbles omniscient. 

via Department of Mathematics at the University of Manchester: Richard Mcnair et al, Exogenous–Endogenous Surfactant Interaction Yields Heterogeneous Spreading in Complex Branching Networks, Physical Review Letters (2025). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.034001

https://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.034001

On Language the Universal Autoencoder

 

  

The 'Arrow of Time' effect: LLMs are better at predicting what comes next than what came before

Sep 2024, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-09-arrow-effect-llms.html

Their performance at predicting the previous word is always a few percent worse than at predicting the next word. This phenomenon is universal across languages, and can be observed with any large language model."

"In theory, there should be no difference between the forward and backward directions, but LLMs appear to be somehow sensitive to the time direction in which they process text. Interestingly, this is related to a deep property of the structure of language that could only be discovered with the emergence of large language models in the last five years."

via EPFL Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne: Vassilis Papadopoulos et al, Arrows of Time for Large Language Models, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.17505

https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2401.17505

Image credit: AI Art - Dental Implantology Services - 2024

Ouch! Study investigates pain vocalizations and interjections across 131 languages

Nov 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-11-ouch-pain-vocalizations-interjections-languages.html

Each of the three emotions yielded consistent and distinct vowel signatures across cultures. Pain interjections also featured similar open vowels, such as "a," and wide falling diphthongs, such as "ai" in "Ayyy!" and "aw" in "Ouch!"

However, for disgusted and joyful emotions, in contrast to vocalizations, the interjections lacked regularities across cultures. The researchers expressed surprise at this latter finding.

Is this because disgust is cultural, or at least not entirely physical, and heavily mediated by culture, as compared to actual pain? This is commonly understood in the realm of olfactory perception, where some people think the smell of revolting, rotten fish is delicious (they're Norwegian). Or the smell of vomit (they're Italian, Parmesan to be specific), or the smell of the inside of the skin folds of a homeless person who hasn't been able to bathe in months (they're called New Yorkers, and they kind of long for the smell of the subway, which contains these volatiles). In fact, anything that's fermented is so close to rotten food, that unless you've been culturally conditioned to like it, you won't, at least not at first. Cilantro, I'm looking at you too. 

via CNRS et Université Lumière Lyon, School of Social Sciences at University of Western Australia, and Institute of Psychology at University of Wrocław: Vowel signatures in emotional interjections and nonlinguistic vocalizations expressing pain, disgust and joy across languages, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2024). DOI: 10.1121/10.0032454

https://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0032454

Words activate hidden brain processes shaping emotions, decisions and behavior

Jan 2025, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-01-words-hidden-brain-emotions-decisions.html

Words have meaning, but they also have emotional meaning:

"There's no single brain region handling this activity, and it's not as simple as one chemical representing one emotion."

(These studies were done thanks to the participation of patients being treated for epilepsy.)

The researchers discovered emotionally charged words - whether positive, negative, or neutral - modulate neurotransmitter release. By measuring the sub-second dynamics of the releases, they identified distinct patterns tied to emotional tone, anatomical regions, and which hemisphere of the brain was involved.

"The surprising result came from the thalamus. This region hasn't been thought to have a role in processing language or emotional content, yet we saw neurotransmitter changes in response to emotional words. This suggests that even brain regions not typically associated with emotional or linguistic processing might still be privy to that information. For instance, parts of the brain responsible for mobilizing movement might benefit from having access to emotionally significant information to guide behavior."

Note: The words used in the study were drawn from the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) database, which rates words by positive, negative, or neutral emotional valence.

via Virginia Tech School of Neuroscience and Fralin Biomedical Research Institute: Seth R. Batten et al, Emotional words evoke region- and valence-specific patterns of concurrent neuromodulator release in human thalamus and cortex, Cell Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2024.115162

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2024.115162

The Artist Within

The first tremblings of terror come from a computer program that can write a legal brief, and then argue in real time against a trained human lawyer. But that's obvious. Diagnosing cancer by looking at an x-ray? Pssh. Saw that coming. 

The way technology co-evolves with our species is by getting in the middle of the more creative processes, because that's insidious, which means we don't notice, and so we can't stop it.

The advance of creative pursuit is circuitous, it's unmeasurable, and subject to unannounced yet dramatic shifts in paradigmatic underpinnings. In fact, nobody is even arguing that it's a kind of progress. Your benchmarks, your metrics - they have no power here. A state board of medical examiners will tell you how good this year's crop of doctors perform on their exams etc. There is no national artist database counting the overall social effects of Banksy's automated self-destructive artwork, or Kehinde Wiley's painting of Barack Obama. Because that's not how that works. 

When you let the robot into the house - the temple that is your body and the mind that controls it - it does things there. And because this isn't a real place, it's hard for us to keep track of what's happening. 

These things start small, and they don't seem like a big deal, because who cares if a robot is making art, or even suggestions for making art. I mean it's not like it's making executive orders from the Presidential Office, right? And the willingness to use an automated industrial process to reproduce imagery, let's say via Japanese woodcuts or Andy Warhol's prints, vs "requiring" that a human, perhaps a shaman, maybe just an "artist", to make each image from their own hands, what did that do to us as a species? Did that change us more than allowing in-vitro fertilization for reproduction? Or birth control pills? I doubt it. Then again, maybe they're related (for example by changing the way we value and rely on "real" humans among us). 

We can't answer these questions very well, but we can probably agree that this is where shit gets weird:

Graph-based AI model finds hidden links between science and art to suggest novel materials

Nov 2024, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-11-graph-based-ai-hidden-links.html

They analyze a collection of 1,000 scientific papers about biological materials and turn them into a knowledge map in the form of a graph, using "category theory". The graph revealed how different pieces of information are connected and was able to find groups of related ideas and key points that link many concepts together.

Researchers can use this framework to answer complex questions, find gaps in current knowledge, suggest new designs for materials, and predict how materials might behave, and link concepts that had never been connected before.

The AI model found unexpected similarities between biological materials and "Symphony No. 9," suggesting that both follow patterns of complexity.

In another experiment, the graph-based AI model recommended creating a new biological material inspired by the abstract patterns found in Wassily Kandinsky's painting, "Composition VII." The AI suggested a new mycelium-based composite material. "The result of this material combines an innovative set of concepts that include a balance of chaos and order, adjustable property, porosity, mechanical strength, and complex patterned chemical functionality."

Above image: Mycelium-based biological material inspired by Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition VII - Markus Buehler at MIT - 2025 [link]

via MIT: Markus J Buehler, Accelerating scientific discovery with generative knowledge extraction, graph-based representation, and multimodal intelligent graph reasoning, Machine Learning: Science and Technology (2024). DOI: 10.1088/2632-2153/ad7228

https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/2632-2153/ad7228

Thumbnail image credit: Graffiti from Berlin Wall stone section - Chew Yen Fook Nikon Small World - 2024

https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2024-photomicrography-competition/graffiti-from-berlin-wall-stone-section

Science Works in Mysterious Ways

 

I'm collecting images of the photon revolution, where all the articles about advancements in computing have rainbows in them. You're welcome. 

Next, how science works:

Miniature treadmills accelerate studies of insects walking

Sep 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-09-miniature-treadmills-insects.html

Yes, fruit fly-sized treadmills.

via University of Washington School of Medicine: Brandon G. Pratt et al, Miniature linear and split-belt treadmills reveal mechanisms of adaptive motor control in walking Drosophila, Current Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.08.006

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.08.006

Artificial mouth mimics human tongue movements to understand the oral processing of soft foods

Oct 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-10-artificial-mouth-mimics-human-tongue.html

Yes it is.

The device is based on anatomical data collected at the Fujita Health University and features a silicone tongue that contracts using compressed air to mimic the movements of the human tongue. 

Click the link above if you want to see a picture of the artificial tongue. But only if you want to.

via National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment: Alejandro Avila-Sierra et al, A first-of-its-kind 3D biomimetic artificial mouth capable of reproducing the oral processing of soft foods, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-73629-9

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-73629-9

What a gut fungus reveals about symbiosis and allergy

Nov 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-11-gut-fungus-reveals-symbiosis-allergy.html

The finding suggests that preclinical studies until now have overlooked a major influencer of mouse physiology:

In 2019, a team led by National Institutes of Health found that "wildling" lab mice raised with gut microbes like those of wild mice do a better job of modeling human immune responses than traditional lab mice. The lab, which participated in that study, found significantly higher levels of fungal DNA in the gut of these mice—magnitudes greater than previously observed in lab mice.

The team looked for evidence of the fungus in fecal samples and other material provided by pest-control companies in New York City and Los Angeles, and acquired samples from multiple research institutions that use or sell lab mice. Ultimately, they determined that K. pintolopesii is very common in wild mice, but also often present in lab mouse colonies without researchers knowing about its presence.

"K. pintolopesii can completely change the experimental outcome."

via Weill Cornell Medical College: Yun Liao et al, Fungal symbiont transmitted by free-living mice promotes type 2 immunity, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08213-2

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08213-2

Microplastics found in the brains of mice within hours of consumption

Jan 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-microplastics-brains-mice-hours-consumption.html

(Blinking guy meme)

The team installed tiny windows in their skulls, allowing them to track the movement of the plastic in their brains.

via Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Duke University, and National University of Singapore: Haipeng Huang et al, Microplastics in the bloodstream can induce cerebral thrombosis by causing cell obstruction and lead to neurobehavioral abnormalities, Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr8243

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adr8243

Scientists discover neurons that count each bite and signal when to stop eating

Feb 2025, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-02-scientists-neurons.html

via Columbia University Irving Medical Center: Brainstem Neuropeptidergic Neurons Link a Neurohumoral Axis to Satiation, Cell (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2025.01.018.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.01.018

High-speed videos show what happens when a droplet splashes into a pool

Feb 2025, phys.org 

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-high-videos-droplet-splashes-pool.html

How are we still studying this? Yet here we are.

via MIT: R. Dandekar et al, Splash on a liquid pool: coupled cavity–sheet unsteady dynamics, Journal of Fluid Mechanics (2024). DOI: 10.1017/jfm.2024.1105

https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2024.1105

Post Script Extraordinaire:

How UFO sightings can help measure public attention and economic patterns

Dec 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-ufo-sightings-attention-economic-patterns.html

Now this is some actual ufo science: UAP sightings are more frequent in wealthier regions but exhibit counter-cyclical patterns within those regions over time. These findings suggest that shifts in attention to extraordinary phenomena may reflect broader fluctuations in public focus.

• Positively correlated with economic conditions across regions but display counter-cyclical patterns within regions over time.
• Causal link between restricted mobility (like COVID lockdowns) and increased UAP reports
• Regions with higher sighting levels show muted responses to monetary policy shocks, suggesting that attention variations can significantly influence economic outcomes.

via Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Nathan Goldstein et al, Looking up the sky: unidentified aerial phenomena and macroeconomic attention, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1057/s41599-024-04182-z

https://dx.doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-04182-z

In related news, you've never had so much fun at a science lecture:

Sasquatch Distribution Modelling: Investigating patterns of Bigfoot sightings in North America

Annual Halloween lecture by Prof Joss Wright at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oct 31 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_upySOOzcI

Sub-contracting the Subconscious

 

People just don't think like they used to!

Increased AI use linked to eroding critical thinking skills

Jan 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-ai-linked-eroding-critical-skills.html

Cognitive Offloading - where individuals rely on the tools to reduce mental effort; questions arise about long-term impacts on memory, attention, and problem-solving.

Younger participants showed higher dependence ... 

It's hard, or near impossible, not to remember that Socrates warned of the alphabet and reading as having the same effect on the youth of ancient Greece. Yet still, this is the recommendation:

The study's findings, if replicated, could have significant implications for educational policy and the integration of AI in professional settings. Schools and universities might want to emphasize critical thinking exercises and metacognitive skill development to counterbalance AI reliance and cognitive effects.

I am not marketing for the AI takeover in any way, but how about the idea that instead of these "tools" causing a decline in critical thinking, they might be allowing us to choose where we use critical thinking...like they might be allowing us to better decide when to decide, and when to leave it to the robots. It's likely that the majority of people, no matter their age, will not ask a robot how to best take care of their mom after their dad dies. Or whether to tell their spouse they've been unfaithful.

Maybe we're actually wasting precious brainpower on stupid decision all day; maybe we're wasting our most important skill over all skills, that of critical thinking, that which sets us apart from every other organism on this planet. And maybe it's the wasted decisions, the wasted thoughts, that we're getting rid of. And maybe it's a sign that the critical thinking tests we use today are actually part of that waste, and we need to devise even more complex surveys to detect the even more complex thinking that we can attain now that we've dumped all the less important stuff. 

I mean what happened to the youth of ancient Greece? How were we measuring their intelligence and how might it have changed? Could you imagine what the test would have looked like? And what it would leave out that today we take for granted as basic thinking skills?

via Swiss Business School: Michael Gerlich, AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking, Societies (2025). DOI: 10.3390/soc15010006

https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006

Image credit: AI Art - Guy with Megaphone Talking into Laptop - 2023

Post Script:

New essay warns of dangers in measurement illiteracy

Jan 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-essay-dangers-illiteracy.html

"From the American eugenics movement to the 2008 market crash, history is replete with episodes showing the adverse impact that failures of measurement literacy can exact on the enterprise of science and everyday human affairs."

This essay is a good reminder of how complicated science is. 

via City College of New York's Grove School of Engineering and several others: Arthur Paul Pedersen et al, Discourse on measurement, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2401229121

https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2401229121

Transmogrify My AI

AKA I Am a Man!

Leading AI chatbots show dementia-like cognitive decline in tests, raising questions about their future in medicine

Dec 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-12-ai-chatbots-dementia-cognitive-decline.html

Something about anthropomorphism - saying they have dementia, like saying they hallucinate, is assigning human-like qualities to a robot:

Researchers assessed the cognitive abilities of the leading, publicly available LLMs — OpenAI's ChatGPT versions 4 and 4o, Anthropic's Claude 3.5 "Sonnet", and Google's Gemini versions 1 and 1.5 — using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test, widely used to detect cognitive impairment and early signs of dementia, usually in older adults. 

ChatGPT 4o achieved the highest score (26 out of 30), followed by ChatGPT 4 and Claude (25), with Gemini 1.0 scoring lowest (16).

The uniform failure of all large language models in tasks requiring visual abstraction and executive function highlights a significant area of weakness that could impede their use in clinical settings.

"Not only are neurologists unlikely to be replaced by large language models any time soon, but our findings suggest that they may soon find themselves treating new, virtual patients - artificial intelligence models presenting with cognitive impairment."

via Department of Neurology at Hadassah Medical Center Jerusalem, Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University: G Koplewitz: Age against the machine—susceptibility of large language models to cognitive impairment: cross sectional analysis, BMJ (2024). DOI: 10.1136/bmj-2024-081948

https://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2024-081948

Image credit: Robotic eye surgery device - University of Utah's John A. Moran Eye Center - Feb 2025

AI's next frontier: Selling your intentions before you know them

Dec 2024, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-12-ai-frontier-intentions.html

Sure it sounds scary, but isn't this what predictive analytics is all about? (And we've been doing that for years)

Forthcoming - "persuasive technologies" using "digital signals of intent" to predict your behavior in real time via Anthropomorphic AI agents. 

"We caution that AI tools are already being developed to elicit, infer, collect, record, understand, forecast, and ultimately manipulate and commodify human plans and purposes."

Again, "We caution that AI tools are already being developed to elicit, infer, collect, record, understand, forecast, and ultimately manipulate and commodify human plans and purposes."

via University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence: Beware the Intention Economy: Collection and Commodification of Intent via Large Language Models, Harvard Data Science Review (2024). DOI: 10.1162/99608f92.21e6bbaa

https://dx.doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.21e6bbaa

Condé Nast, other news orgs say AI firm stole articles, spit out “hallucinations”

Feb 2025, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/news-orgs-accuse-ai-firm-of-stealing-articles-and-creating-fake-news/

In February 2024, [generative AI company] Cohere announced that it would provide legal protection against intellectual property claims to its paying enterprise customers. This includes "full indemnification for any third party claims that the outputs generated by our models infringe on a third party's intellectual property rights," for Cohere "enterprise customers that comply with our guidelines and do not intentionally attempt to generate infringing content." (Note this is not a ruling like the Reuters case but just the beginning of the lawsuit.)

Release the copybot trolls!

New study identifies differences between human and AI-generated text

Feb 2025, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-02-differences-human-ai-generated-text.html

Just the stats ma'am: 

They show how LLMs write by prompting them with extracts of writing from various genres, such as TV scripts and academic articles. 

LLMs used present participle clauses at two to five times the rate of human text, as demonstrated in this sentence written by GPT-4o: "Bryan, leaning on his agility, dances around the ring, evading Show's heavy blows."

They also used nominalizations at 1.5 to two times the rate of humans, and GPT-4o uses the agentless passive voice at half the rate as humans. This suggests that LLMs are trained to write in an informationally dense, noun-heavy style, which limits their ability to mimic other writing styles.

The researchers also found that instruction-tuned LLMs have distinctive vocabularies, using some words much more often than humans writing in the same genre. For example, versions of ChatGPT used "camaraderie" and "tapestry" about 150 times more often than humans do, while Llama variants used "unease" 60 to 100 times more often. Both models had strong preferences for "palpable" and "intricate."

Can we just pause for a minute and recognize that we're saying "more often than humans do" as if we knew what universal human speech was like. All this talk about bias in the algorithms, certainly important because it can be amplified, but what about the bias in the base sets? What are the base data we're using to say what a "human" is like?

Also, as a native English speaker, I do recognize that non-natives tend to overuse present participles (like words ending in -ing), which may or may not have anything to do with this and the joke that 'AI is just three [people from underdeveloped communities] in a trenchcoat'. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, go listen to an Excel tutorial for a few minutes. ...

via Carnegie Mellon University: Alex Reinhart et al, Do LLMs write like humans? Variation in grammatical and rhetorical styles, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2422455122

https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2422455122

Facts, Fakes, Fake Facts and Psychological Operators

 

Brainwashing an entire population is hard work!

News consumers are more influenced by political alignment than by truth, study shows

Nov 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-11-news-consumers-political-alignment-truth.html

The study is based on research conducted in 2020 with a sample of the voting-age U.S. population matched to the demographics of the census, and made up news headlines whereas earlier studies relied on existing ones. They also used a cover story about memory and communication, and even included foil questions, so that participants would not be aware of the nature of the study.

Both supporters and opponents believed those that aligned with their views more than they believed true headlines that did not align with their views.

"We found that the strongest predictors of bias include extreme views of Trump, a one-sided media diet, and belief in the objectivity and lack of bias of a person's own political side relative to the other side." 

In one measure of bias, the researchers assessed people's beliefs about their political side's objectivity as compared to the other side. Ironically, those most confident in their political side's lack of bias were the most biased.

In addition, the effect of partisan bias was stronger for real news than fake news. That is, people were more likely to disbelieve true information that challenged their political worldview than to accept false information that confirmed their worldview.

"We saw it on both political sides and even among people who scored well on a reasoning test. We were a bit surprised to see how widespread this tendency was. People were engaging in a lot of resistance to inconvenient truths."

"Everyone thinks it's the other person who is the problem."

But this very important point can't be overlooked, dropped halfway through the press article:

One contributing factor for this state of affairs, the researchers suggest, is increased consumption of partisan media.

And just for good measure, let's recall that as of 2010 Citizen's United allows private industry to contribute campaign funds to those running for public office. (As in, who's paying for that partisan media? Yes, that's who.) 

via: Department of Psychology in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford: Michael C. Schwalbe et al, When politics trumps truth: Political concordance versus veracity as a determinant of believing, sharing, and recalling the news., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2024). DOI: 10.1037/xge0001650

https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0001650

Image credit: AI Art - Close-up Yelling Into a Telephone - 2024

Brief scientific literacy interventions may quash new conspiracy theories

Dec 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-scientific-literacy-interventions-quash-conspiracy.html

Americans in states with higher scientific literacy scores were less likely to believe in conspiracies and had higher COVID-19 vaccination uptake rates over the time period.

via Penn State's Smeal College of Business: Nathan Allred et al, Conspiracy Beliefs and Consumption: The Role of Scientific Literacy, Journal of Consumer Research (2024). DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucae024

https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae024

A tangled web: Social media analysis suggests coordinated messaging among fossil fuel-derived hydrocarbon industries

Jan 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-01-tangled-web-social-media-analysis.html

Power rises to the top: "Our study suggests that climate obstruction in different industries is more coordinated than is generally recognized...these different companies in different sectors are using the same strategic messaging to promote a distorted image of their environmental responsibility."

Details: 125,300 unique tweets posted from 2008–2023 by the main Twitter accounts of nine key players in the US fossil energy/plastics/agrichemical trade: ExxonMobil, Chevron, American Petroleum Institute, Dow, Dupont de Nemours, Inc, American Chemistry Council, Corteva Agriscience, FMC Corp, American Farm Bureau

via Northeastern University: PLOS Climate (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0000370

https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000370

New AI tool detects fake news with 99% accuracy

Jan 2025, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2025-01-ai-tool-fake-news-accuracy.html

The method developed by the researchers uses an "ensemble voting" technique, which combines the predictions of multiple different machine learning models to give an overall score.

(Too bad we don't actually care; see above.)

via Keele University School of Computer Science and Mathematics: Patricia Asowo et al, An Ensemble Modelling of Feature Engineering and Predictions for Enhanced Fake News Detection, Artificial Intelligence XLI (2024). DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-77918-3_16

https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-77918-3_16

Meta-analysis uncovers public's skill in detecting fake news, but skepticism towards true news persists

Mar 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-meta-analysis-uncovers-skill-fake.html

While their findings suggest that most people can accurately judge the veracity of news, they also showed that people are slightly better at spotting false news than true news. In other words, most of the people who took part in the studies appeared to be better skilled at rating false news as false than rating true news as true.

"A small majority of people show this trend (59%). The implication of this finding is that we should focus more on increasing the acceptance of true news. Currently, a lot of efforts are dedicated to making people skeptical of (false) news, however, our data shows that there may be more room to increase the acceptance of true news than to reduce the acceptance of false news."

I also remember the study about how mainstream news being skeptical of a science fact are more influential than a fake news site spreading obvious fake shit, for example BBC saying there may be a small risk of myocarditis for example, even if they have a million other articles that say vaccines are safe. There is a risk of myocarditis, but the risk of dying, or becoming disabled, from Covid due to lack of vaccination is far, far higher. See here or here.

via Jan Pfänder et al, Spotting false news and doubting true news: a systematic review and meta-analysis of news judgements, Nature Human Behaviour (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-02086-1.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-02086-1