Feedback is New Scientist's popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com As companies frantically roll out AI tools in a bid to avoid hiring or training actual people, we see AI being used in ever more diverse and bizarre applications. Like, say, running a vending machine. You might think that vending machines are largely a solved problem, but not Anthropic.

We usually associate alcohol with memory loss, but a small new study suggests it may actually have the opposite effect. The research found that individuals were better able to remember information if they drank alcohol after learning. Of course, this does not offset the dangerous health consequences of abusing alcohol, but a celebratory drink after class may not be such a bad idea. The study found that individuals who drank alcohol after completing a word-learning task were able to remember more of what they learned than those who did not drink alcohol. The researchers suggest the reason for this may be related to alcohol's effect on the hippocampus, the area of the brain that consolidates new information into memories.

This post is aimed at artists and other creative people who are interested in a survey of recent developments in machine learning research that intersect with art and culture. If you've been following ML research recently, you might find some of the experiments interesting but will want to skip most of the explanations. The first AI that left me speechless was a chatbot named MegaHAL. It turns out MegaHAL was basically sleight of hand, picking a single word from your input and using a technique called Markov chains to iteratively guess the most likely words that would precede and follow based on a large corpus of example text (not unlike some Dada word games). But reading these transcripts in high school had a big effect on how I saw computers, and my interest in AI even affected where I applied to college.

The robot, named Gaia, outside of a dorm on Harvard's campus. Would you let a stranger into your apartment building? Granting an unknown person access to a building was a humorous premise for a Seinfeld episode, but the decision to trust a stranger reveals insights into human psychology and touches on broader issues of trust in society. But what if, instead of a human, a robot knocked at your door? It's a question that Harvard University senior Serena Booth set out to answer with the help of a small, wheeled robot -- well, more like a roving nightstand -- that she stationed at the entrances to several dorms on campus.