- Researchers have found people trust algorithms over humans. “[P]eople showed more trust in an algorithm's answer when the problem presented to them got more complex over time. Given that algorithms essentially govern our daily lives — by way of online retail, advertising, streaming TV shows or films, looking for live events, consulting Google Maps, determining “beauty scores,” or even trying to find love — this kind of reliance and confidence in such technology is a bit of concern for anyone remotely familiar with artificial intelligence’s numerous flaws.”
- Watch a robot make a sandwich. There’s something beautiful about a robot performing a task so utterly pedestrian, but in a way that differs slightly from how a human would do it.
- This ‘charming’ particle could have saved the universe. “Particles that can make the leap between matter and antimatter are important because they lie at the core of one of the biggest mysteries of science: why the universe exists in the first place. […] Some hypotheses suggest that particles like the charm meson could have saved the material universe from annihilation — especially if they transition from antimatter to matter more often than they go the other way.”
- Stress study shows graying hair is reversible. “A new study has produced first-of-a-kind scientific evidence of this connection, identifying proteins in human hairs that seem to drive this process, while also demonstrating how it might even be reversed.” Say what now?
- How to avoid a cosmic catastrophe. “One way to avoid a cosmic catastrophe of this type is to establish an interstellar treaty, similar to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signed first in 1963 by the governments of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. The objective of the ‘Planck Collider Treaty’ would be to protect our cosmic environment from artificially produced domain walls. With no such treaty, we could only wish that all civilizations would behave responsibly when they acquired the technological maturity to build a Planck-energy collider. We would have to hope that our neighbors would exhibit cosmic responsibility.”