Relying on ChatGPT significantly affects critical thinking abilities, according to a new study. Researchers from MIT Media Lab, Wellesley College, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design conducted a four-month study titled "Your Brain on ChatGPT" and found users of large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's chatbot "consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels." This included the participants' decreased brain activity, a weaker sense of authorship, and inability to remember what they wrote -- which even continued when they weren't allowed to use an LLM. Anyone who uses ChatGPT for writing may have drawn similar conclusions; the point of using LLMs, after all, is to automate the work and outsource the critical thinking effort. But with this MIT study, there's now scientific evidence showing that relying on ChatGPT and other LLMs can impair memory and learning.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. When you think of koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus), chances are that words like cute or fluffy come to mind--not cryptic or stealthy. And yet, researchers in southeastern Australia have just discovered hundreds of previously undocumented koalas living surprisingly close to the city of Newcastle. The team conducted what they claim to be the largest and most accurate peer-reviewed koala survey to date. As detailed in a study published this month in the journal Biological Conversation, the survey estimates that a population of 4,357 koalas across 166,302 acres of land is living in the state of New South Wales.

Tens of millions of Americans engage in a taboo habit that scientists have warned could pose risks to cognitive health. A recent study found that regularly viewing pornography can immediately reduce a person's performance on tasks requiring attention and cognitive control right after exposure to explicit content. Impaired executive function and reduced cognitive performance are known early markers of cognitive decline, a precursor to dementia. Research has suggested that if such effects are sustained or repeated over time, they could potentially contribute to long-term health risks. In the study, college students watched a 10-minute internet pornographic video chosen for its high viewership.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In recent years, researchers and climate advocates have been ringing the alarm about artificial intelligence's impact on the environment. Advanced and increasingly popular large language models (LLMs)--such as those offered by OpenAI and Google--reside in massive data centers that consume significant amounts of electricity and water to cool servers. Every time someone types a question or phrase into one of these platforms, the energy used to generate a response produces a measurable amount of potentially harmful CO₂. But, according to a new research published in Frontiers in Communication, not all of those prompts leave have the same environmental impact.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. For 20 years, the remains of a giant lizard that lived alongside dinosaurs were tucked away in a jar at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Simply labeled "lizard," the fragmented and several millennia-old bones actually belonged to an entirely new species of giant lizard dug up from the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah in 2005. Bolg amondol was a raccoon-sized armored mostesaurian lizard that lived about 77 million years ago, similar to today's Gila monsters (Heloderma horridum). It is named after the goblin prince from The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien and is described in a study published June 17 in the open-access journal Royal Society Open Science.

Meta's Llama model has memorized Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone so well that it can reproduce verbatim excerpts from 42 percent of the book, according to a new study. Researchers from Stanford, Cornell, and West Virginia University analyzed dozens of books from the now-infamous Books3 dataset, a collection of pirated books used to train Meta's Llama models. The study's authors say their findings could have major implications for AI companies facing similar lawsuits. Specifically, the study found that Llama 3.1 has memorized 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book so well that it can reproduce verbatim excerpts at least 50 percent of the time. Overall, Llama 3.1 could reproduce excerpts from 91 percent of the book, though not as consistently.

Generative AI models quickly proved they were capable of performing technical tasks well. Adding reasoning capabilities to the models unlocked unforeseen capabilities, enabling the models to think through more complex questions and produce better-quality, more accurate responses -- or so we thought. Last week, Apple released a research report called "The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity." As the title reveals, the 30-page paper dives into whether large reasoning models (LRMs), such as OpenAI's o1 models, Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking (which is the reasoning version of the base model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet), and DeepSeek R1, are capable of delivering the advanced "thinking" they advertise. Also: OpenAI's o1 lies more than any major AI model.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Most insects have evolved to see the blue, green, and even ultraviolet spectrums. But most insects have trouble parsing one hue in particular: red. Even bees and other pollinators that visit traditionally vibrant poppies aren't attracted by the visible coloration, but by the UV light reflected from their petals. Now, an international zoology team has discovered that some insect species can manage to see what their relatives cannot.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. For nearly two decades, balloons carrying highly sensitive atmospheric instruments have drifted more than 25 miles above one of the world's most remote regions. The floating array is the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, a project overseen by an international group of researchers tasked with measuring some of the universe's oldest and hardest-to-detect cosmic rays. Specifically, the team is hunting for neutrinos--particles with no charge that also possess the smallest known subatomic mass. But according to their recent report, ANITA has repeatedly picked up some truly weird signals that defy explanation.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. As with many mysteries of the mind, science doesn't have one neat answer. "You'll get as many answers to the question'What is the purpose of dreaming?' as there are dream psychologists," says Deirdre Barrett, dream researcher at Harvard University and author of The Committee of Sleep. According to Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, dreams offered vital clues to unresolved conflicts buried deep within our psyche. But Freud's theory, introduced in his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams, sparked plenty of controversy.