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10 vulnerable wildlife species to watch in 2026

Popular Science

The Swampy Black Iguana is the oldest specimen living at the Iguana Station scientific station, where they have a breeding and conservation project for black spiny-tailed iguanas. This species, endemic to Utila, is in danger of extinction. The Utila Iguana Conservation Project seeks to ensure the survival of this species. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. With the turning of the calendar comes a new year and new vulnerable endangered plant and animal species to keep a watchful eye on.


Can animals read? Not in the human way.

Popular Science

A 2024 study found that cats learn to associate images with words faster than human babies. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. "My cat always watches my phone as I text or read a book," someone wrote on Reddit . "Even right now she is on my shoulder, intently watching what I am typing on this post. Can she read or is she just interested in what I am doing?"


Democratic or Authoritarian? Probing a New Dimension of Political Biases in Large Language Models

Piedrahita, David Guzman, Strauss, Irene, Schölkopf, Bernhard, Mihalcea, Rada, Jin, Zhijing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into everyday life and information ecosystems, concerns about their implicit biases continue to persist. While prior work has primarily examined socio-demographic and left--right political dimensions, little attention has been paid to how LLMs align with broader geopolitical value systems, particularly the democracy--authoritarianism spectrum. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to assess such alignment, combining (1) the F-scale, a psychometric tool for measuring authoritarian tendencies, (2) FavScore, a newly introduced metric for evaluating model favorability toward world leaders, and (3) role-model probing to assess which figures are cited as general role-models by LLMs. We find that LLMs generally favor democratic values and leaders, but exhibit increased favorability toward authoritarian figures when prompted in Mandarin. Further, models are found to often cite authoritarian figures as role models, even outside explicit political contexts. These results shed light on ways LLMs may reflect and potentially reinforce global political ideologies, highlighting the importance of evaluating bias beyond conventional socio-political axes. Our code is available at: https://github.com/irenestrauss/Democratic-Authoritarian-Bias-LLMs.