Science (Page 67)

The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic saw consumers flocking to the shops to urgently stock up on items such as toilet paper and pasta. This phenomenon, termed “panic buying”, is now happening again in Britain – but this time it’s fuel that people are after. Continued panic buying is only going to perpetuate any fuel shortages. So what can be done to stop it? Panic buying is a natural reaction to a stressful experience. In particular, it’s a response to uncertainty. When people feel things are uncertain, they tend to focus on something that gives them a sense of certainty and makes them feel in control. Of course, most people can’t recruit new lorry drivers or mobilise the army toContinue Reading

Sarah Holmlund/Shutterstock This episode of The Conversation’s In Depth Out Loud podcast explores why experts are worried about AIs becoming addicts. You can read the text version of this in-depth article here. The audio version is read by Peter Hanly in partnership with Noa, News Over Audio. You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, for free, on the Noa app. Thomas Moynihan and Anders Sandberg at the University of Oxford explain one growing issue with real-world AIs: wireheading, a phenomenon strangely akin to addiction in humans. They track the history of this issue, which is quickly becoming a hot topic among machine learning experts and those concerned with AI safety. The music in In Depth Out Loud isContinue Reading

Following her triumph in the recent US Open tennis tournament, Emma Raducanu was interviewed by Chinese media outlet CGTN and revealed that maths was her favourite subject at school. Raducanu told the interviewer she was “a numbers person” and really enjoyed the problem-solving aspect. The tennis player, who recently received an A* at A-level, said she loved working on maths puzzles which, she said, gave her a thrill to solve. Her passion for maths follows in the footsteps of Britain’s last US Open winner in the women’s singles, Virginia Wade. Wade is also a keen mathematician, picking up a maths degree from the University of Sussex in 1966. This coincidence may spark questions about whether mathematical ability is useful forContinue Reading

Can spider webs predict the onset of winter? Probably not. Charlie Goodall/Shutterstock The tell-tale signs that autumn is here are clear to us; the days are getting shorter and the temperature is decreasing. We take this as a sign to pull out our winter woollies and think about turning on the radiators. But how do insects know that winter is coming? And what do they do to prepare? Folklore has suggested over the years that insects and other invertebrates can predict the weather and that, for example, we could start to see bigger spider webs if the weather is going to get colder. The evidence for those bigger webs ahead of bad weather is weak. But there certainly are changesContinue Reading

FabrikaSimf/Shutterstock With Japan riding the crest of its postwar economic miracle, Sony chairman Akio Morita and Japan’s Minister of Transport Shintarō Ishihara unleashed a manifesto. The document, published in 1989, contained a prophecy that propelled it to domestic bestseller status, and into the concerned hands of officials at the CIA. At the time, the authors noted, the American and Soviet superpowers had become “dependent on the initiative of the Japanese people” in developing new technology, as exemplified by the country’s dominant production of semiconductor chips. For Morita and Ishihara, this signalled “the end of modernity developed by Caucasians” and the emergence of “an era of new genesis” led by Japanese technological supremacy. Fast forward to 2021, and Japan’s high-tech imageContinue Reading

Are these the footprints of the first-known American teen? Matthew Robert Bennett, Author provided Our species began migrating out of Africa around 100,000 years ago. Aside from Antarctica, the Americas were the last continents humans reached, with the early pioneers crossing the now-submerged Bering land bridge that once connected eastern Siberia to North America. At times throughout the Pleistocene ice age, which ended 10,000 years ago, large ice sheets covered much of Europe and North America. The water locked in these ice sheets lowered the sea level, allowing people to walk the bridge from Asia through the Arctic to Alaska. But during the peak of the last glacial cycle, their path south into the Americas was blocked by a continental-wideContinue Reading

Black Salmon/Shutterstock Finding the right work-life balance is by no means a new issue in our society. But the tension between the two has been heightened by the pandemic, with workers increasingly dwelling over the nature of their work, its meaning and purpose, and how these affect their quality of life. Studies suggest people are leaving or planning to leave their employers in record numbers in 2021 – a “great resignation” that appears to have been precipitated by these reflections. But if we’re all reconsidering where and how work slots into our lives, what should we be aiming at? It’s easy to believe that if only we didn’t need to work, or we could work far fewer hours, we’d beContinue Reading