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Though it is common to complain that advertising is following you everywhere and algorithms control our news, it is instead the case that the more tedious or challenging a task becomes, the more humans trust computers instead. Not many people listen to 4,000 songs to create a playlist they like, they make a playlist with a few and let Spotify do the rest.A recent study involved 1,500 individuals evaluating photographs. The team asked volunteers to count the number of people in a photograph of a crowd and supplied suggestions that were generated by a group of other people and suggestions generated by an algorithm. 

Some people believe that marijuana can be medical but almost no marijuana users think it impairs their vision.Though over 90 percent of users believe that cannabis has no effect on their vision, or perhaps a slight effect, smoking cannabis significantly alters key visual functions such as visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, three-dimensional vision (stereopsis), the ability to focus, and glare sensitivity, according to research.

Though modern humans and our closest evolutionary relatives, the great apes, shared a common ancestor millions of years ago, most similarities stop there. We live on the ground, walk on two legs and have much larger brains. That doesn't mean the larger brains evolved first. The first populations of the genus Homo emerged in Africa about 2.5 million years ago and though they already walked upright, their brains were only about half the size of today's humans. These earliest Homo populations in Africa had primitive ape-like brains - just like their extinct ancestors, the australopithecines.

Micronutrient deficiencies pose health problems for a third of the world's population. Worldwide, zinc deficits are more problematic in the rural areas of developing countries, where diets are largely limited to vegetable products grown in soils suffering from low nutrient availability. Biofortification, the process of bolstering the nutritional value of crops by increasing the concentration of vitamins and minerals in them, has arisen as a remedy for this problem.  Recent trials determined that foliar application, applying liquid fertilizer directly to leaves instead of the soil, boosted the zinc content of wheat grain by up to 50 percent.

Eucalyptus trees are a pest-resistant evergreen that produce good lumber and oil that wealthy elites in the "wellness" marketplace buy - they are also an invasive species. A new paper shows how scientists used CRISPR-Cas9 to knock out LEAFY, the master gene behind flower formation, so the trees will not reproduce sexually. The greenhouse study involved a hybrid of two species, Eucalyptus grandis and E. urophylla, that is widely planted in the Southern Hemisphere; there are more than 700 species of eucalyptus, most of them native to Australia.

Beer has been important throughout human history. Given how dangerous water was in the past, it is arguably true that civilization would not exist without beer.Yet if you make your own, you have to think about waste. Spent grain, the malt and adjuncts left over from the mash, is 85 percent of brewing waste. If you don't have a compost pit or a farm somewhere close by, it's going inro the garbage.

Pilot results from San Bernardino County, California, where crime is prevalent and distrust in government high, found that religion may be key to COVID-19 vaccine uptake. Focused education efforts and an on-site mobile clinic in Black church parking lots resulted in the vaccinations of 417 people, 84% of whom were Black. Results also showed an increase in Black attendance of mass vaccination clinics to 3.6% of total patients, up from 3%, in the week following asking Black churches and clergy to help in COVID-19 vaccination education and distribution.

What sets human communication apart from lower animals is its compositionality, which means that units of meaning can be combined and new meanings can be constructed. The words "blue" and "car" have their own meanings but combined there is a new content, i.e., a car that is blue.

Just a few short years ago, CRISPR-Cas9 technology took the world of molecular biology by storm because it allowed a cost-effective way to shut off or turn on traits in organisms without any side effects.CRISPR is an acronym of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, a bacterial defense system. The enzyme Cas9 acts like a pair of ‘molecular scissors’ that can cut two strands of DNA and insert of remove something. Then CRISPR repairs it.Now it's gotten upgrade. Instead of one or two genes, a new study knocked out 12 at once.

Even previously considerate and helpful male managers have become less likely to mentor female employees, according to a new study. They've become less likely to even talk one-on-one with women.This unintended consequence of the #MeToo movement could deny female employees critical development and thus career advancement. Women are not the problem, a large portion of female employees report a willingness to be mentored by an older male co-worker, but career advancement also has a social component, and in the last few years men are less likely to work one-on-one in an office with the door closed and less likely to engage in social behavior, like a post-work dinner with female employees.

Having a single primary care physician is statistically correlated to increased treatment adherence and decreased hospital admissions and mortality risk. A new paper finds it may also lead to costly unnecessary tests. Male patients who have a single general physician were more likely to receive a prostate cancer screening test during a period when the test was not recommended by the US Preventive Services Task Force. Greedy doctors? No, the tests don't pay enough money to be meaningful, it is that doctors invariably prefer to side with patients over insurance companies or government protocols.

Whatever Uncanny Valley when it comes to machines still existed in 2019 got a lot smaller in 2020. We're even being nicer to them since 2020.People mostly dispense with social norms of human interaction and treat machines differently. The behavior holds true even as machines became more "human" seeming, such as Amazon's Alexa or Morgan Freeman in your vehicle navigation system. Human default behavior is often driven by heuristic thinking -- the snap judgments people use to navigate complex daily interactions. The Uncanny Valley says that as artificial things begin to seem more human, but not close enough to pass for human, we are put off. That all changed due to COVID-19. We got nicer toward our machine and other people.