Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. If you've ever wondered whose addresses Charles Darwin was sure to keep tabs on--or even a few rat poison recipes--you're in luck. A digitized edition of the famed naturalist's personal address book is available online for the first time. "It's incredible that this little treasure-trove of details by Darwin has remained unpublished until now," NUS science historian John van Wyhe said in a statement . "It offers fascinating new insights into his life and the way he worked."

In this paper, I present a novel method to detect intellectual influence across a large corpus. Taking advantage of the unique affordances of large language models in encoding semantic and structural meaning while remaining robust to paraphrasing, we can search for substantively similar ideas and hints of intellectual influence in a computationally efficient manner. Such a method allows us to operationalize different levels of confidence: we can allow for direct quotation, paraphrase, or speculative similarity while remaining open about the limitations of each threshold. I apply an ensemble method combining General Text Embeddings, a state-of-the-art sentence embedding method optimized to capture semantic content and an Abstract Meaning Representation graph representation designed to capture structural similarities in argumentation style and the use of metaphor. I apply this method to vectorize sentences from a corpus of roughly 400,000 nonfiction books and academic publications from the 19th century for instances of ideas and arguments appearing in Darwin's publications. This functions as an initial evaluation and proof of concept; the method is not limited to detecting Darwinian ideas but is capable of detecting similarities on a large scale in a wide range of corpora and contexts.

How can something understood as the universal symbol for joy so easily become the makings of our worst nightmares? Unhappy, unsettling smiles--like those in Todd Phillips' Joker or the truly chilling masks donned by Ethan Hawke in last year's The Black Phone--appear here to stay as fixtures of the horror genre. Paramount's new flick, directed by Parker Finn, makes the concept its very premise, with the movie following a psychiatrist plagued by smiles everywhere she turns. Baseball fans got a taste of her strife thanks to a stunt marketing campaign for Smile featuring actors smiling creepily behind the dugout. Whereas the 2018 horror film Truth or Dare used CGI to stretch the smiles of the actors like a Snapchat filter befitting the uncanny valley, the smiles in Smile for the most part do not appear digitally modified, by my estimate.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk, one of the masterminds behind projects such as Tesla and SpaceX, announced his next venture, namely Neuralink. The company aims to merge humans with electronics, creating what Musk calls the neural lace. It is a device that injected into the jugular vein would reach the brain and then unfold into a network of electrical connections connected directly to human neurons. The idea is to develop enhanced brain-computer interfaces to increase the extent to which the biological brain can interact and communicate with external computers. The neural lace will go down to the level of brain neurons: it will be a mesh that will be able to connect directly to brain matter and then connect with a computer. That human being will be a cyborg.

Do your facial movements broadcast your emotions to other people? If you think the answer is yes, think again. This question is under contentious debate. Some experts maintain that people around the world make specific, recognizable faces that express certain emotions, such as smiling in happiness, scowling in anger and gasping with widened eyes in fear. They point to hundreds of studies that appear to demonstrate that smiles, frowns, and so on are universal facial expressions of emotion.

Two centuries after Charles Darwin put the theory forward, a new study finally shows that birds living near the equator are more colourful. Scientists have used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the amount of colour in photos of over 24,000 preserved birds from the Natural History Museum's collection. Tropical birds living near the equator are roughly 30 per cent more colourful than non-tropical birds living nearer the poles, the scientists found, but they don't know exactly why. The long-held theory, first suspected by Charles Darwin and other naturalists in the 18th and 19th centuries, hasn't been proven until now, the experts say. Research from the University of Sheffield found tropical birds living near the equator are roughly 30 per cent more colourful than non-tropical birds living nearer the poles.

Darwin designed his tongue-in-cheek cost-benefit analysis to help himself make a choice. In that respect, it was an algorithm, as are recipes, business processes and just about any other instructions that we use in our daily lives either to solve problems or to complete tasks. Nowadays, algorithms are programmed into devices to automate jobs that past generations had to do by hand. We call it artificial intelligence and it has moved into the mainstream. All this has been made possible by recent improvements in software and hardware, which have boosted computational performance, data storage capabilities and network bandwidth. AI technologies are driving the digital transformation of industry and society by satisfying demands for more intelligent services and analytics.

When we humans imagine the future, it is common to picture ourselves nested within an ecosystem populated by robots, devices, and virtual realities. The future is shining and technological. The future is digital, ones and zeros, electricity and invisible connections. The dangers of the future--automation and artificial intelligence--are of our own invention. Nature is an afterthought in our contemplation of what comes next, a transgenic potted plant behind a window that does not open.

Men who only briefly catch a glimpse of a woman are much more likely to overestimate how attractive she is than a woman glimpsing a man, a study reveals. Researchers, led by Murdoch University, in Perth Australia, worked with nearly 400 volunteers, asking them to rate the attractiveness of people of the opposite-sex from a blurry image, and then from a clear image. The results showed that on average men overestimate women's attractiveness, whereas on average women underestimate men's attractiveness. If you've been having trouble finding love on dating apps, you might want to try dating one of your friends. A study looked at data from just under 2,000 couples of different demographics in Canada.

There is consensus, especially in our current deep-learning era, that more training data almost always helps improve performance of our deep learning models. But the process of collecting labeled data remains a costly and cumbersome task. Naturally, researchers started looking into this problem, which has led to development of various techniques for reducing the labeling cost. Among these, is a popular technique called weak supervision, in which a collection of heuristics and rules are used to label the data. Of course, the labels would be noisy but these weak labels have proven to be valuable as long as the rules have a reasonable error rate.