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The experience of young users on Meta’s Instagram—where Bejar had spent the previous two years working as a consultant—was especially acute. In a subsequent email to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, one statistic stood out: One in eight users under the age of 16 said they had experienced unwanted sexual advances on the platform over the previous seven days.

For Bejar, that finding was hardly a surprise. His daughter and her friends had been receiving unsolicited penis pictures and other forms of harassment on the platform since the age of 14, he wrote, and Meta’s systems generally ignored their reports—or responded by saying that the harassment didn’t violate platform rules.

“I asked her why boys keep doing that,” Bejar wrote to Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants. “She said if the only thing that happens is they get blocked, why wouldn’t they?”

Were people happier in the 1950s than they are today? Or were they more frustrated, repressed and sad? To find out, you'd have to compare the emotions of one generation to another. British anthropologists think they may have found the answer — embedded in literature.

This effort began simply with lists of "emotion" words: 146 different words that connote anger; 92 words for fear; 224 for joy; 115 for sadness; 30 for disgust; and 41 words for surprise. All were from standardized word lists used in linguistic research.

We didn't really expect to find anything," he says. "We were just curious. We really expected the use of emotion words to be constant through time." Instead, in the study they published in the journal PLOS ONE, the anthropologists found very distinct peaks and valleys, Bently says.

"Most neuroscientific research has been devoted to negative symptoms — depression and addiction, instead of joy," says Donatella Marazziti, an Italian psychiatrist who has studied neurotransmitter levels in the brains of people who've recently fallen in love.

And she's found that a brain in the initial stage of love looks surprisingly like a brain experiencing a drug addiction.

This, Fisher says, explains the feeling of obsession many people experience when falling in love. "It's what gives you the elation and the craving that is basic to romantic love.

Language is very probably the one characteristic that separates us from the chimpanzees, our closest relatives. All other major differences between us likely stem from language.

[Language] allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind and they can attempt to do the same to you without either of you performing surgery

language is a "social technology" that allows for cooperation between unrelated individuals and groups. According to the archaeological record, it was this cooperation and sharing of ideas that preceded human migration around the planet and the ensuing human population explosion.

The idea was this: genes strive for immortality, and individuals, families, and species are merely vehicles in that quest. The behaviour of all living things is in service of their genes hence, metaphorically, they are selfish.

Before this, it had been proposed that natural selection was honing the behaviour of living things to promote the continuance through time of the individual creature, or family, or group or species. But in fact, Dawkins said, it was the gene itself that was trying to survive, and it just so happened that the best way for it to survive was in concert with other genes in the impermanent husk of an individual

This gene-centric view of evolution also began to explain one of the oddities of life on Earth – the behaviour of social insects. What is the point of a drone bee, doomed to remain childless and in the service of a totalitarian queen? Suddenly it made sense that, with the gene itself steering evolution, the fact that the drone shared its DNA with the queen meant that its servitude guarantees not the individual’s survival, but the endurance of the genes they shar

How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,”

concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”

“they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and psychology that cannot be ignored.”

The coal industry knows that to stop runaway climate change all coal-powered generators need to close Australia joined 174 countries and the European Union in 2015, signing the Paris agreement. In doing so, Australia agreed to do its part in keeping the global temperature rise “well below” 2C.

According to data from the Office of the Chief Economist, the demand for coal-generated electricity has dropped by more than 15% in the past eight years.

Coal is now the most expensive form of new power. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the cost of energy from a new coal power plant would be $134-$203/MWh. That’s more expensive than wind, solar or highly efficient combined-cycle gas (costing $61-$118/MWh, $78-$140/MWh and $74-$90/MWh, respectively).

Scientists at the University of Manchester have developed a new type of self-replicating computer that uses DNA to make calculations, a breakthrough that could make computing far more efficient.

Cohen outlined a vision of 'Net-enabled scholarly publishing that I can only think to call the aggregation model: editorial committees scanning the 'Net to find the most interesting scholarly content in a given field or discipline, and highlighting it through websites and e-mail blasts that hearken back to the early days when weblogs were literally just collections of links with one- or two-sentence summaries attached. (An example, edited by Cohen and some of his associates: Digital Humanities Now.) Some of that work consists of traditional books and articles, but much of it consists of blog posts, online debates, etc. This model gives us scholarly work from the bottom up, instead of generating published scholarly work by tossing a piece into the random crapshoot of putatively blind peer-review and crossing your fingers to see what happens. It also gives us scholarly work that can be certified as such by the collective deliberation of the community, which "votes" for pieces and ideas by reading them, recirculating them, linking to them, and other signs of interest and approval that can be easily tracked with traffic-tracing tools. And then, on top of that editorial aggregation -- Cohen made a great point that this kind of aggregation shouldn't be fully automated, because automated tools reward "loudmouths" and popular voices that just get retweeted a lot; human editors can do a lot to surface novel insights and new voices -- an open-access journal that curates the best of those linked items into published pieces, perhaps with some revisions and peer review/commentary.

All scientific results are, of course, subject to revision and refutation by later experiments. The problem comes when these replications don’t occur and the information keeps spreading unchecked. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Raw Data: Hills to Scientific Discoveries Grow SteeperFEB. 17, 2014 Raw Data: New Truths That Only One Can SeeJAN. 20, 2014 D

Based on the number of papers in major journals, Dr. Ioannidis estimates that the field accounts for some 50 percent of published research.

Together that constitutes most of scientific research. The remaining slice is physical science — everything from geology and climatology to cosmology and particle physics. These fields have not received the same kind of scrutiny as the others. Is that because they are less prone to the problems Dr. Ioannides describe

He calls himself an ethical hacker who helps companies and individuals fight back against the bad guys operating online. Over the years, Charles Tendell also has emerged as a commentator in the news media about the threat posed by overseas hackers and is a former co-host of an online radio show about security.

But behind the scenes, Mr. Tendell, a Colorado resident and a decorated Iraq War veteran, started a new website called Hacker’s List that allows people to anonymously post bids to hire a hacker. Many users have sought to find someone to steal an email password, break into a Facebook account or change a school grade.

The propensity is for people to use it as a way to search for hackers willing to break the law as opposed to doing legitimate online investigations and surveillance.

That was the purpose of a recent oral history event at the Royal Society, involving four senior scientists who began their careers in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than simply reminiscing, they were asked to recall their publishing experiences in scientific periodicals over the last fifty years. How have things changed since they published their first paper?

It became clear that the hierarchy of journals has changed over the last fifty years, and the pressure to publish in those considered to have the highest impact has increased considerably, partly a result of the increased volume of data being produced and the need for readers to filter relevant information from the copious amounts of less pertinent stuff available.

What have also changed are the technologies available to write a paper. Frith related the process she went through in writing her first paper: “I wrote my papers by long hand and then typed them myself.” Writing a biological paper before computers is one thing, but Ashmore remembered the problems of producing mathematical formulae in a typed manuscript, explaining that “you wrote the paper and probably took it along to somebody to be typed… And then it came back with spaces where you had to write in the equations.”

Although previous work had indirectly suggested that changing mitochondrial function affected lifespan, “this is the first clear demonstration [that it] extends mouse lifespan,” Miller added.

well known that mitochondria are linked to health. Some evidence suggests that inhibiting mitochondrial function can be harmful—as in the case of diabetes or obesity—but earlier data from nematodes and fruit flies also suggest a link to lifespan increase. The latest findings are a step toward untangling one of the current debates in the field—whether inhibiting mitochondrial function is detrimental or beneficial,

The average lifespan of BXD mice range from 1 year to almost 2.5 years. The researchers were able to link 3 genes to longevity variability, including mitochondrial ribosomal protein S5 (Mrps5), which encodes a protein integral to mitochondrial protein synthesis. They found that BXD strains with 50 percent less Mrps5 expression lived about 250 days longer than BXD mice with more robust Mrps5 expression.

Pluto’s moons have been tracked closely for the first time, showing that they tumble unpredictably rather than keeping one face fixed on their host planet.

Astronomers also observed that Pluto, whose status was downgraded to a dwarf planet in 2006, might be better regarded as a binary dwarf as it is locked in orbit with its largest moon, called Charon.

“Like good children, our moon and most others keep one face focused attentively on their parent planet,’ said Douglas Hamilton, professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland and a co-author of the study. “What we’ve learned is that Pluto’s moons are more like ornery teenagers who refuse to follow the rules.”

Researchers have developed a cheap and rapid test that reveals a person’s full history of viral infections from a single drop of blood.

The test allows doctors to read out a list of the viruses that have infected, or continue to infect, patients even when they have not caused any obvious symptoms. The technology means that GPs could screen patients for all of the viruses capable of infecting people

When a droplet of blood from a patient is mixed with the modified viruses, any antibodies they have latch on to human virus proteins they recognise as invaders. The scientists then pull out the antibodies and identify the human viruses from the protein fragments they have stuck to.

Previous research has shown that women generally experience higher levels of emotional stimulation than men. Now, a new large-scale study from the University of Basel suggests that gender differences in emotion processing are also linked to sex variation in memory and brain activity.

finding that women rated these images as more emotionally stimulating than men, particularly in the case of negative images. When presented with emotionally neutral imagery, however, the men and women responded similarly.

After being exposed to the images, the participants completed a memory test. The female participants were able to recall significantly more of the images than their male counterparts.

The US economy is booming. On Friday, the Commerce Department announced overall US unemployment had fallen to 5.5%. Yet the unemployment rate for young Americans rose to double digits last month. Unemployment rate for those aged 20-24 years old was 10% in February – up from 9.8% in January.

Coming of age during a recession can have impact one’s life for years to come. Earnings of young Americans who entered the job market during a recession will suffer for 10-15 years, says Will Kimball from the Economic Policy Institute.

When candid, news editors and TV producers admit they presume their audience files climate change under “worthy but dull”. They know they should care, but they struggle.

For the media, climate change is Kryptonite. It fails to tick almost every one of the boxes that defines a story. For one thing, it’s not new: it’s a perennial part of the background noise of 21st-century life.

Cognitive psychologists speak of “loss aversion”: when presented with a choice between a relatively small sacrifice now and an uncertain but larger loss a generation from now, human beings rarely make the apparently obvious and rational move, to make the sacrifice. Add to that our “optimism bias”: the tendency to assume that all will be well in the end – that “they” will think of some whizzy technical fix to keep the world’s temperature stable, and humanity will dodge the bullet.

extra difficulties imposed irrationally by antiscience.

Large outbreaks in the U.S. of the highly infectious disease have become more common in the past two years, even though measles hasn’t been indigenous since 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

difficult because concerns about a possible link between vaccines and autism—now debunked by science—have expanded to more general, and equally groundless, worries about the effects of multiple shots on a child’s immune system, vaccine experts and doctors say.

The study, published in the Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology journal, looks only at data, correlating BMI with dementia diagnoses in general practice records and making allowances for anything that could skew the picture.

“We haven’t been able to find an explanation,” said Qizilbash. “We are left with this finding which overshadows all the previous studies put together. The question is whether there is another explanation for it. In epidemiology, you are always left with the question of whether there is another factor.”

Dr Simon Ridley, from Alzheimer’s Research UK, said further work is needed. “This study doesn’t tell us that being underweight causes dementia, or that being overweight will prevent the condition,” he said.