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Proteins are the building blocks of life. Formed of chains of amino acids, folded up into complex shapes, their 3D structure largely determines their function. Once you know how a protein folds up, you can start to understand how it works, and how to change its behaviour

Although DNA provides the instructions for making the chain of amino acids, predicting how they interact to form a 3D shape was more tricky and, until recently, scientists had only deciphered a fraction of the 200m or so proteins known to science

major social platforms have grown less and less relevant in the past year. In response, some users have left for smaller competitors such as Bluesky or Mastodon. Some have simply left. The internet has never felt more dense, yet there seem to be fewer reliable avenues to find a signal in all the noise. One-stop information destinations such as Facebook or Twitter are a thing of the past. The global town square—once the aspirational destination that social-media platforms would offer to all of us—lies in ruins, its architecture choked by the vines and tangled vegetation of a wild informational jungle

Musk has turned X into a deepfake version of Twitter—a facsimile of the once-useful social network, altered just enough so as to be disorienting, even terrifying.

At the same time, Facebook’s user base began to erode, and the company’s transparency reports revealed that the most popular content circulating on the platform was little more than viral garbage—a vast wasteland of CBD promotional content and foreign tabloid clickbait.

ccording to the old saying, the eyes are windows into the soul, revealing deep emotions that we might otherwise want to hide.

Although modern science precludes the existence of the soul, it does suggest that there is a kernel of truth in this saying: it turns out the eyes not only reflect what is happening in the brain but may also influence how we remember things and make decisions.

Our eyes are constantly moving, and while some of those movements are under conscious control, many of them occur subconsciously.

WhatsApp is encouraging users to update to the latest version of the app after discovering a vulnerability that allowed spyware to be injected into a user’s phone through the app’s phone call function.

The spyware was developed by the Israeli cyber intelligence company NSO Group, according to the Financial Times,

Attackers could transmit the malicious code to a target’s device by calling the user and infecting the call whether or not the recipient answered the call.

Musk is just one of the people in Silicon Valley to take a keen interest in the “simulation hypothesis”, which argues that what we experience as reality is actually a giant computer simulation created by a more sophisticated intelligence

Oxford University’s Nick Bostrom in 2003 (although the idea dates back as far as the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes). In a paper titled “Are You Living In a Simulation?”, Bostrom suggested that members of an advanced “posthuman” civilization with vast computing power might choose to run simulations of their ancestors in the universe.

If we believe that there is nothing supernatural about what causes consciousness and it’s merely the product of a very complex architecture in the human brain, we’ll be able to reproduce it. “Soon there will be nothing technical standing in the way to making machines that have their own consciousness,

Photographic memory, eidetic memory, Hyperthymesia, Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, perfect recall, there are a number of labels to choose from when discussing formidable memory prowess.

However, the idea that someone has a “flawless” memory, is able to remember everything from any aspect of their lives in great and accurate detail, is far from confirmed by available scientific evidence.

when you ask more personal life events that things get tricky. If someone describes the scene at their 7th birthday and what presents they got, how you are supposed to confirm if they’re remembering it correctly?

“Researchers say our brains aren’t wired to make sense of big numbers.” A story about a single tragic death evokes waves of sadness and emotion in us. We focus on the individual’s details, their life story, and the circumstances of their death. As the number of victims increases, our ability to muster empathy fades, something often called compassion fatigue.

If we talk instead about multiple people like Constance Johnson at once or just give the numbers involved—about 4,200 women die every year from cervical cancer—the information loses its impact. We don’t comprehend a number like 4,200 the way we do the story of a single individual.

As the results of a study by Paul Slovic and colleagues in 2014 showed, the tendency to be charitable and feel compassion diminishes rapidly as the number of people involved increases from one.

The Neurocognition, Early Experience and Development Lab is home to cutting-edge research on how poverty affects young brains, and I’ve come here to learn how Noble and her colleagues could soon definitively prove that growing up poor can keep a child’s brain from developing.

handful of neuroscientists and pediatricians who’ve seen increasing evidence that poverty itself – and not factors like nutrition, language exposure, family stability, or prenatal issues, as previously thought – may diminish the growth of a child’s brain.

poor kids tended to perform worse academically than their better-off peers

If cinema had the impact on the world that film critics insisted they did in 2019, Joker would have brought about an incel revolution, and Little Women would have ended misogyny.

This was the year police departments issued warnings about the possibility of mass shootings at opening-night screenings of Joker, after all. It was a hysteria that built online after film critics saw the movie at festivals and started to complain it somehow “glamorized” or sympathized with violent incels.

But if you insist that a movie is important, you don’t really have to deal with whether or not it’s good. You can shame people into seeing it as a political statement, rather than as an entertainment or cultural selection. Same with the “dangerous” or “disturbing” moniker, which got used on everything from Joker to the latest Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, which was marked down for everything from not giving its female co-star Margot Robbie enough lines to its gratuitous violence against a female would-be murderer to its filming of women’s feet (fetishes are now dangerous, I guess). If a critic doesn’t like a film, labeling it as dangerous – and implying you might get killed if you go see it – is an attempt to keep people away.

Personality traits are characteristics that relate to the factory settings of our motivational system.

Values are factors that drive what we find to be important. Research by Schwartz and his colleagues suggests that there is a universal set of values.

Researchers are interested in understanding how these two sources of stability in a person over time are inter-related and whether changes in one factor (like personality) create changes in another (like values). This question was addressed in a paper in the August 2019 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Our approach, which borrows from physics and in particular the work of Richard Feynman, goes under the bonnet. It attempts to capture the mathematical structure of the phenomenon – in this case, the pandemic – and to understand the causes of what is observed. Since we don’t know all the causes, we have to infer them. But that inference, and implicit uncertainty, is built into the models

That’s why we call them generative models, because they contain everything you need to know to generate the data. As more data comes in, you adjust your beliefs about the causes, until your model simulates the data as accurately and as simply as possible.

A common type of epidemiological model used today is the SEIR model, which considers that people must be in one of four states – susceptible (S), exposed (E), infected (I) or recovered (R). Unfortunately, reality doesn’t break them down so neatly. For example, what does it mean to be recovered?

an unusually large number of books about rationality were being published this year, among them Steven Pinker’s “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters” (Viking) and Julia Galef’s “The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t” (Portfolio).

When the world changes quickly, we need strategies for understanding it. We hope, reasonably, that rational people will be more careful, honest, truthful, fair-minded, curious, and right than irrational ones.

And yet rationality has sharp edges that make it hard to put at the center of one’s life

Many observers saw quite quickly that Trump’s personality was highly disordered.

The opportunity for everyone to learn a lot about this domineering, exploitative, unstable and superficially charismatic personality type has presented itself on a grand scale.

All the neuroimaging, all the psychological theorising, all the psychiatric experimentation with pharmacology, it’s already prompting a huge need for careful, scientifically anchored engagement with the ethical and philosophical debate about what it is to be human.

Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has become an immensely powerful media organization in its own right, albeit one that effectively subcontracts actual news gathering to other entities (this newspaper included). And its potential influence is amplified by the fact that this Cronkite-esque role is concealed by Facebook’s self-definition as “just” a social hub.

Beck is right that Facebook is different in kind from any news organization before it, and that traditional critiques of media bias — from the Chomskyite left as well as from the right — don’t apply neatly to what it’s doing.

the more plausible (and inevitable) exercise of Facebook’s power would be basically unconscious

Winning stimulates dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin. Just watching competition stimulates these happy chemicals through our mirror neurons.

Happy chemicals are stimulated by behaviors that promote survival in the state of nature.

 Dopamine is the good feeling of getting a reward the meets your needs.

Now scientists have found a more noble purpose for the technique in a study that suggests deep-rooted biases about race and gender could be “unlearnt” during a short nap. The findings appear to confirm the idea that sleeping provides a unique window for accessing and altering fundamental beliefs – even prejudices that we don’t know we have.

Simply playing auditory cues while people slept partially undid racial and gender bias, the study found, and the effects were still evident at least a week later.

“These biases are well-learned,” said Hu. “They can operate efficiently even when we have the good intention to avoid such biases. Moreover, we are often not aware of their influences on our behaviour.”

actor Peter Mullan has criticised the BBC for “horrendous bias” in its reporting of the Scottish independence referendum.

said he is “a massive supporter of public broadcasting and the licence fee”.

“Panorama made me want to go to libraries and find out about the world. I mean it when I say I owe everything to the BBC.

If the condescending views of John Cregan about the increasing interest in teaching Latin (Letters, 29 May) are correct, one wonders why the Iris project has had such success in expanding its work across the country and why Barbara Bell’s splendid Latin course for younger children, Minimus, has just exceeded worldwide sales of 150,000.

John Cregan’s description of Latin as “a waste of time” is contradicted by the recent growth of its use in state primary schools;

furthermore his “dead” language remains in evidence all around us

Though investment had declined under the previous government, all the major parties said some warm words on the topic. Going beyond that vague-but-positive consensus would have required pinning politicians down to specific pledges

There are also important discussions to be had about how funding is managed and distributed, and how such decisions are made. In arguments about levels of funding, expect most researchers to agree that more is better – no surprise there, and the quality of the arguments deserves scrutiny.

Those hoardings are coming down now, which makes the whole thing seem more approachable - as does the fact that a couple of physicists from my department have won access to the labs there. It will be a huge concentration of resource - intellectual and financial

In a rare bipartisan moment US lawmakers opened up the possibility of mining on other worlds despite an international treaty barring sovereign claims in space

The US Senate passed the Space Act of 2015 this week, sending its revisions of the bill back to the House for an expected approval, after which it would land on the president’s desk. The bill has a slew of provisions to encourage commercial companies that want to explore space and exploit its resources, granting “asteroid resource” and “space resource” rights to US citizens who managed to acquire the resource themselves.

lawmakers defined “space resource” as “an abiotic resource in situ in outer space” that would include water and minerals but not life.