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What shapes your personality? Your genes and environment play a big role.

Popular Science

Your genes and environment play a big role. But the ratio of each is up for debate. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. These 1980 headshots show the cast of'Fridays,' an American late-night live comedy show, demonstrating a range of different personalities. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week.


Kids outlearn AI--and we still don't know why

MIT Technology Review

LLMs need vastly more data than children to learn language. Understanding why could help us create more efficient models--and reveal more about developing minds. People have been talking to each other for at least 100,000 years, as best we can tell. And in all that time, there has been only one thing in the world that could learn a human language to perfect fluency: a human child. Four short years after the release of ChatGPT, many of us now take it for granted that we can converse naturally with our phones or computers. LLMs like Claude, DeepSeek, and OpenAI's GPT models are fluent and flexible enough to masquerade convincingly as humans. But peek behind the computational curtain, and there's a catch: Teaching a computer to use human language still requires an inhuman amount of data. An LLM can easily churn through a hundred thousand times more words than a person will experience in the process of mastering their mother tongue--and way more than children might hear by their first birthday, when they typically start to grab hold of language. "The progress recently has been amazing," Michael C. Frank, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, says of LLMs. "But we still have to burn down a forest and scrape the entire sum of all human knowledge to re-create this milestone that happens in our living rooms over the course of a year."


'I was taken from school and trained to fly UFOs with my mind,' claims child genius

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Terrifying stomach cancer explosion sweeps the US: After fitness influencer's shock death, experts reveal subtle early signs that are too often ignored... and lifestyle tweaks that can PREVENT it Actress, 43, announces she is expecting with sweet video after detailing'complicated' journey to motherhood and hope of having third child Trump foe Rosie O'Donnell to replace Jimmy Kimmel as he steps back from his show Deadly secrets of gorgeous California enclave where college girls were killed by a'sneaker'... now experts say they could have been SAVED The other women left devastated by Jelly Roll's divorce: Why his daughter is now'disgusted'... as Bunnie's baby bombshell rocks Nashville The shaming of America's original mommy influencer after tragedy that divided the nation: Bode Miller's wife Morgan breaks cover to reveal agonizing regret that still haunts her since daughter's drowning Trump boasts there's'no limits' to his power and posts bizarre memo by fake historian comparing him to Hitler More young Americans are living with their parents than ever before... and there is a shocking reason behind the boomerang trend I was mortified when my husband always said no to sex. Then I realised the mistake I was making. This is the change that's completely transformed marital love-making in middle age: ALICE SNAPE Revealed: Hero, 24, who saved man's LIFE in dramatic rescue during New York Knicks victory parade after defying cops' orders: 'I'm just another New Yorker' REVEALED: Gavin Newsom steered millions of dollars of donations to nonprofits connected to his wife... as Trump's DOJ probes couple The shingles vaccine could lower dementia risk'by up to a quarter' - but scientists are still puzzled why Farce of Obama's $850m'monstrosity': As clucking liberal elite cheer Barack's grand opening, outraged Chicago locals tell HARRIET ALEXANDER awkward truth about library Why turnips MUST be in your grocery cart if you're trying to lose weight Taco Bell's finally fixes a glaring menu gap - and brings back a fan favorite after years Mom thought popular'natural' health supplement was safer than Xanax. She took it... then never woke up. Don't make the same mistake Mother and child in critical condition after being swallowed into ocean by ANOTHER monstrous California wave... just days after college students were killed by breaker'I was taken from school and trained to fly UFOs with my mind,' claims child genius A former gifted child has come forward with claims that he was removed from public school and secretly trained to develop psychic abilities for military and UFO-related applications.


Why Watching Sports Makes People Happy

TIME - Tech

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The ChatGPT Symptom Spiral

The Atlantic - Technology

Be careful asking chatbots about your health. After George Mallon had his blood drawn at a routine physical, he learned that something may be gravely wrong. The preliminary results showed he might have blood cancer. Further tests would be needed. Left in suspense, he did what so many people do these days: He opened ChatGPT.


Psychologists made people look at spiders. They didn't like it.

Popular Science

Environment Animals Wildlife Spiders Psychologists made people look at spiders. Humans will try to focus on almost anything else. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. There are plenty of studies examining why humans are so hardwired to detest spiders . However, fewer researchers have spent time investigating just far we'll go to avoid even looking at them.At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, psychologists decided to find out for themselves.


Go ahead and swear--it's good for your health

Popular Science

Health Psychology Mental Health Go ahead and swear--it's good for your health Cursing can boost your workout, mood, and even confidence. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Yelling a properly timed swear word isn't only emotionally satisfying--it may have real physical and psychological benefits . In fact, a well-voiced expletive might even help take you to the next level during a particularly strenuous workout. "In many situations, people hold themselves back--consciously or unconsciously--from using their full strength," explained Richard Stephens, a psychologist at Keele University in the United Kingdom.


Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing?

The New Yorker

Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing? In 1934, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit eastern India, killing thousands and devastating several cities. Curiously, in areas that were spared the worst destruction, stories soon spread that an even bigger disaster was on its way. Leon Festinger, a young American psychologist at the University of Minnesota, read about these rumors in the early nineteen-fifties and was puzzled. Festinger didn't think people would voluntarily adopt anxiety-inducing ideas. Instead, he reasoned, the rumors could better be described as "anxiety justifying." Some had felt the earth shake and were overwhelmed with fear. When the outcome--they were spared--didn't match their emotions, they embraced predictions that affirmed their fright.


MindEval: Benchmarking Language Models on Multi-turn Mental Health Support

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Demand for mental health support through AI chatbots is surging, though current systems present several limitations, like sycophancy or overvalidation, and reinforcement of maladaptive beliefs. A core obstacle to the creation of better systems is the scarcity of benchmarks that capture the complexity of real therapeutic interactions. Most existing benchmarks either only test clinical knowledge through multiple-choice questions or assess single responses in isolation. To bridge this gap, we present MindEval, a framework designed in collaboration with Ph.D-level Licensed Clinical Psychologists for automatically evaluating language models in realistic, multi-turn mental health therapy conversations. Through patient simulation and automatic evaluation with LLMs, our framework balances resistance to gaming with reproducibility via its fully automated, model-agnostic design. We begin by quantitatively validating the realism of our simulated patients against human-generated text and by demonstrating strong correlations between automatic and human expert judgments. Then, we evaluate 12 state-of-the-art LLMs and show that all models struggle, scoring below 4 out of 6, on average, with particular weaknesses in problematic AI-specific patterns of communication. Notably, reasoning capabilities and model scale do not guarantee better performance, and systems deteriorate with longer interactions or when supporting patients with severe symptoms. We release all code, prompts, and human evaluation data.


Why using a donkey to treat whooping cough makes sense

Popular Science

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Rubbing a black snail on a wart and impailing the creature with a thorn will make the bumps go away. Giving a donkey some bread will treat whooping cough . Mumps can be cured if you rub your head on the back of a pig . They may sound a bit strange now, but folk remedies like these are an important part of human history.