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I brace myself against the freezing air and remind myself that I’m here on a mission – to try and find an answer to a question which causes massive conflict to this day. Debate about it has reached fever pitch in recent years, with schoolteachers even being fired for teaching belief in him.

Certainly not! In fact, science disproves the existence of Santa. We know he couldn’t possibly visit all those children in a single evening, because his sleigh would explode at those speeds! We also know that he couldn’t fit down the chimney…

Not at all. A lot of people assume that because you don’t believe in Santa you must not get any presents, but that just isn’t the case. I get lots of presents, and I enjoy buying presents for my friends.

Incidentally, neuroscience confirms another bit of Christmas wisdom: that the anticipation of the holiday can be as exhilarating as receiving the actual gifts. Rodent research suggests that addicted rats experience pleasure, neurologically speaking, when they anticipate receiving cocaine, even if they don’t actually consume it

In the two years since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, no school shooting has claimed as many lives, nor ones as young, as on that terrible day. But fatal gun attacks at schools and on college campuses remain a fixture of American life. They have occurred once every five weeks on average since Sandy Hook, including two attacks—one in Santa Monica and another near Seattle—in which four or more victims were killed.

dozens of other gun incidents on school grounds that caused injuries, as well as seven additional cases where someone committed suicide with a firearm, but no one else died

Gun violence has regularly been at the political forefront since Newtown. While Congress failed to pass a background check bill four months after the devastation, state lawmakers nationwide approved more than a hundred laws either strengthening or weakening restrictions on firearms in the first year after Sandy Hook alone

Although algorithms are growing ever more powerful, fast and precise, the computers themselves are literal-minded, and context and nuance often elude them. Capable as these machines are, they are not always up to deciphering the ambiguity of human language and the mystery of reasoning.

And so, while programming experts still write the step-by-step instructions of computer code, additional people are needed to make more subtle contributions as the work the computers do has become more involved. People evaluate, edit or correct an algorithm’s work. Or they assemble online databases of knowledge and check and verify them — creating, essentially, a crib sheet the computer can call on for a quick answer. Humans can interpret and tweak information in ways that are understandable to both computers and other humans.

Even at Google, where algorithms and engineers reign supreme in the company’s business and culture, the human contribution to search results is increasing. Google uses human helpers in two ways. Several months ago, it began presenting summaries of information on the right side of a search page when a user typed in the name of a well-known person or place, like “Barack Obama” or “New York City.” These summaries draw from databases of knowledge like Wikipedia, the C.I.A. World Factbook and Freebase, whose parent company, Metaweb, Google acquired in 2010. These databases are edited by humans.

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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

task that took you a couple seconds to complete is a task that computers -- despite decades of advancement and intricate calculations -- still can't perform as efficiently as humans: the visual search.

"Our daily lives are comprised of little searches that are constantly changing, depending on what we need to do," said Miguel Eckstein, UC Santa Barbara professor of psychological and brain sciences. "So the idea is, where does that take place in the brain?"

What Eckstein and co-authors wanted to determine was how we decide whether the target object we are looking for is actually in the scene, how difficult the search is, and how we know we've found what we wanted.

A well-known psychologist in the Netherlands whose work has been published widely in professional journals falsified data and made up entire experiments, an investigating committee has found

Experts say the case exposes deep flaws in the way science is done in a field, psychology, that has only recently earned a fragile respectability.

In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny. Outright fraud may be rare, these experts say, but they contend that Dr. Stapel took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged.

It’s the default prescription for any tense situation: a blind date, a speech, a job interview, the first dinner with the potential in-laws. Relax. Act natural. Just be yourself. But when you’re nervous, how can you be yourself?

Edward Slingerland. He has developed, quite deliberately, a theory of spontaneity based on millenniums of Asian philosophy and decades of research by psychologists and neuroscientists.

He calls it the paradox of wu wei, the Chinese term for “effortless action.”

In contrast to a bit, which is the basic element of a conventional computer and can represent either a zero or a one, a qubit can exist in a state known as superposition, in which it can represent both a zero and a one simultaneously.If the qubits are then placed in an entangled state — physically separate but acting with many other qubits as if connected — they can represent a vast number of values simultaneously.To date, matrices of qubits that are simultaneously in superposition and entangled have eluded scientists because they are ephemeral, with the encoded information dissipating within microseconds.

Researchers have been pursuing the development of computers that exploit quantum mechanical effects since the 1990s, because of their potential to vastly expand the performance of conventional computers

growing body of research has highlighted scientists’ inability to reproduce one another’s results, including a 2012 study that found only 11 percent of “landmark” cancer studies investigated could be independently confirmed.

“Some communities have standards requiring raw data to be deposited at or before publication, but the computer code is generally not made available, typically due to the time it takes to prepare it for release,”

Sage’s solution? An open-source computational platform, called Synapse, which enables seamless collaboration among geographically dispersed scientific teams—providing them with the tools to share data, source code, and analysis methods on specific research projects or on any of the 10,000 datasets in the organization’s massive data corpus. Key to these collaborations are tools embedded in Synapse that allow for everything from data “freezing” and versioning controls to graphical provenance records—delineating who did what to which dataset, for example.

Change, however, has been slow to reach the university economics curriculum. Many institutions still pump students through introductory courses untainted by recent economic history or the market shortcomings it illuminates.

A few plucky reformers are working to correct that: a grand and overdue idea. Overhauling the way economics is taught ought to produce students more able to understand the modern world. Even better, it should improve economics itself.

Yet the standard curriculum is hardly calibrated to impart these lessons. Most introductory texts begin with the simplest of models. Workers are paid according to their productivity; trade never makes anyone worse off; and government interventions in the market always generate a “deadweight loss”. Practising economists know that these statements are more true at some times than others

“Because of its analogies with the rise, fall and alterations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called ‘simulation games,’” Mr. Gardner wrote when he introduced Life to the world 50 years ago with his October 1970 column.

The Game of Life motivated the use of cellular automata in the rich field of complexity science, with simulations modeling everything from ants to traffic, clouds to galaxies. More trivially, the game attracted a cult of “Lifenthusiasts,” programmers who spent a lot of time hacking Life — that is, constructing patterns in hopes of spotting new Life-forms.

The tree of Life also includes oscillators, such as the blinker, and spaceships of various sizes (the glider being the smallest).

From Santa Barbara, Calif., to Hefei, China, scientists are developing a new kind of computer that will make today’s machines look like toys.

the technology will perform tasks in minutes that even supercomputers could not complete in thousands of years.

The new experiment indicates that scientists can stretch a quantum network across an increasingly large number of sites. “We are now building small quantum networks in the lab,” said Ronald Hanson

“I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases,” he told Judge Castel.

At times during the hearing, Mr. Schwartz squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead with his left hand. He stammered and his voice dropped. He repeatedly tried to explain why he did not conduct further research into the cases that ChatGPT had provided to him.

For nearly two hours Thursday, Mr. Schwartz was grilled by a judge in a hearing ordered after the disclosure that the lawyer had created a legal brief for a case in Federal District Court that was filled with fake judicial opinions and legal citations, all generated by ChatGPT.