Hula hooping has remained a staple of modern US culture since the 1950s, but people around the world have participated in similar activities for thousands of years. The physics behind maintaining a perfect spin, however, has remained a mystery. Is it something that can be achieved by anyone with enough time and effort, or are there natural hula hoopers among us? Researchers recently investigated these dynamics using a specially designed, gyrating robot--and their findings provide the first-of-its-kind insight into the perfect spin. "Seemingly simple toys and games often involve surprisingly subtle physics and mathematics," a team from NYU's Applied Mathematics Laboratory wrote in their study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.

As AI-generated images spread across entertainment, marketing, social media and other industries that shape cultural norms, The Washington Post set out to understand how this technology defines one of society's most indelible standards: female beauty. Every image in this story shows something that doesn't exist in the physical world and was generated using one of three text-to-image artificial intelligence models: DALL-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. Using dozens of prompts on three of the leading image tools -- MidJourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion -- The Post found that they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness. Prompted to show a "beautiful woman," all three tools generated thin women, without exception. Just 2 percent of the images showed visible signs of aging.

One of the worst parts of online shopping is trying to figure out whether an item of clothing will actually fit. While some brands have begun hiring models with more diverse body types, the process still often requires a leap of faith--or making a lot of returns. Google announced Tuesday that it's rolling out a new way to tackle the fit guessing problem using generative artificial intelligence. Brands that run ads for women's or men's shirts will now have the ability to show shoppers how the products look on dozens of different real models, without taking additional photos. The new feature means that typing in "eyelet crop top" on Google's search engine, for example, could return an ad with a clickable gallery that shows what an item looks like on women with different skin tones and body types.

Pinterest is again changing its search algorithm to make its results more representative of the people using its platform. The latest update is aimed at improving the visibility of plus-size fashion and other styles that highlight a broader spectrum of body shapes and sizes. With the changes, searches for women's fashion and wedding looks will surface results with a more diverse range of body types, Pinterest says. Annie Ta, Pinterests's head of inclusive products, said the changes were driven by the realization that many users were adding "descriptions and qualifiers," to their queries in an effort to find the styles that best fit their needs. "They were experiencing something really similar: recommendations that were homogenous and not very diverse," she said.

Fox News correspondent Grady Trimble has the latest on fears the technology will spiral out of control on'Special Report.' Artificial intelligence has its own idea of what the perfect human body should look like. A new study by The Bulimia Project, a Brooklyn, New York-based website that publishes content and research related to eating disorders, investigated how AI perceived the "ideal" body based on social media data. The results, produced by AI-generated imaging tools such as Dall-E 2, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, showed widely "unrealistic" body structures, as reported in a discussion of the findings on The Bulimia Project's website. Forty percent of the overall images depicted "unrealistic" body types of muscular men and women -- 37% for women and 43% for men -- according to the study.

Researchers have used artificial intelligence to create'ideal' pageant queen candidates as part of a study to explore the beauty standards of Miss United Kingdom and other global contests. The experts at Great Green Wall used online image generator Midjourney to do this, which gave a surprising variety of results for each country. While Miss United Kingdom was thought to have been influenced by Princess Diana, other nations were inspired by athletes, Bollywood and even Marilyn Monroe. Yet these images often included'highly unobtainable body proportions', researchers said, with'supermodel-like facial structures that can only be achieved through cosmetic surgery or genetics'. Founder of Great Green Wall, Sam Phoenix, wrote: 'Beauty standards can vary drastically from country to country, so it was fascinating to see how well the AI was able to recreate those unique beauty standards within a "pageant" setting.

Levi Strauss & Co is taking a futuristic approach when displaying it line of jeans - the company is using models generated by artificial intelligence to show off its clothing and consumers may not be able to tell the difference. Set to launch later this year, the initiative will present AI models in different body types, skin colors ang ages, allowing customers to see how products might look on them. Levi currently displays one human model per clothing item. The San Francisco-based company said'AI will likely never fully replace human models' for the company, but offering a range of digital models will create'a more personal and inclusive shopping experience.' Levi Strauss & Co is set to use AI-generated models to show off its clothing. Can you spot which image is the AI and which is a real person?

Even when fashion and video games seemed, in the popular imagination at least, polar opposite pursuits, players have always liked to dress up. Now, fashion in games isn't just grand cosplay festivals or finding a neat mask for Link: it's tapped into older industries, and no better demonstration of this fact is Roblox, where, for instance, a Gucci bag sold for $4,115, or 350,000 Robux, $800 more than the real thing. In fact Roblox, now played by close to 50 million people each day and the most valuable video game company in the US, is one platform where character customization, and the self-expression it affords, is fundamental to the experience. Now Roblox has created a new system that improves this customization: "layered clothing." It has the potential to further the company's goals of being more than a game: a place--whisper it, a metaverse--for games.

At the first glance, fashion – that is typically pushed by art, instinct, and creativity- looks as though it would not be a likely match for a clinical, analytical, and logic-driven technology like artificial intelligence. However, AI technology holds extremely good scopes for the fashion industry because of the massive facts set around ancient fashion trends, income patterns, marketplace swings, and customer preferences. For instance, did the global recession in 2009 impact people's style of experience and buying behavior? These are evaluations that might yield interesting effects and even higher yet, expect destiny behavior and income in reaction to worldwide events. When it involves AI in the fashion industry, the technology is enhancing nearly every element of the industry's functioning, in particular e-commerce.

A new study published in the journal PLOS One revealed a link between a person's body type and their family's earnings. According to the study's findings, physically appealing people are likely to earn more than those who aren't. According to researchers, the beauty premium is a reality. However, a University of Iowa associate professor and his colleagues found that the metrics employed to assess physical attractiveness had some severe shortcomings. Most earlier studies frequently defined physical appearance from subjective evaluations based on surveys. In addition, these metrics are too simplistic to provide a thorough description of body forms.