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“When you show people deepfakes and generative AI, a lot of times they come out of the experiment saying, ‘I just don’t trust anything anymore,’” says David Rand, a professor at MIT Sloan who studies the creation, spread and impact of misinformation.

This problem, which has grown more acute in the age of generative AI, is known as the “liar’s dividend,

The combination of easily-generated fake content and the suspicion that anything might be fake allows people to choose what they want to believe, adds DiResta, leading to what she calls “bespoke realities.”

Examples of misleading content created by generative AI are not hard to come by, especially on social media

The signs that an image is AI-generated are easy to miss for a user simply scrolling past, who has an instant to decide whether to like or boost a post on social media. And as generative AI continues to improve, it’s likely that such signs will be harder to spot in the future.

“What our work suggests is that most regular people do not want to share false things—the problem is they are not paying attention,”

in the course of a lawsuit over the death of a man using Tesla’s “full self-driving” system, Elon Musk’s lawyers responded to video evidence of Musk making claims about this software by suggesting that the proliferation of “deepfakes” of Musk was grounds to dismiss such evidence. They advanced that argument even though the clip of Musk was verifiably real

are now using its existence as a pretext to dismiss accurate information

People’s attention is already limited, and the way social media works—encouraging us to gorge on content, while quickly deciding whether or not to share it—leaves us precious little capacity to determine whether or not something is true

If the crisis of authenticity were limited to social media, we might be able to take solace in communication with those closest to us. But even those interactions are now potentially rife with AI-generated fakes.

what sounds like a call from a grandchild requesting bail money may be scammers who have scraped recordings of the grandchild’s voice from social media to dupe a grandparent into sending money.

companies like Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are trying to spin the altering of personal images as a good thing. 

With its latest Pixel phone, the company unveiled a suite of new and upgraded tools that can automatically replace a person’s face in one image with their face from another, or quickly remove someone from a photo entirely.

Joseph Stalin, who was fond of erasing people he didn’t like from official photos, would have loved this technology.

In Google’s defense, it is adding a record of whether an image was altered to data attached to it. But such metadata is only accessible in the original photo and some copies, and is easy enough to strip out.

The rapid adoption of many different AI tools means that we are now forced to question everything that we are exposed to in any medium, from our immediate communities to the geopolitical, said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who

To put our current moment in historical context, he notes that the PC revolution made it easy to store and replicate information, the internet made it easy to publish it, the mobile revolution made it easier than ever to access and spread, and the rise of AI has made creating misinformation a cinch. And each revolution arrived faster than the one before it.

Not everyone agrees that arming the public with easy access to AI will exacerbate our current difficulties with misinformation. The primary argument of such experts is that there is already vastly more misinformation on the internet than a person can consume, so throwing more into the mix won’t make things worse.

it’s not exactly reassuring, especially given that trust in institutions is already at one of the lowest points in the past 70 years, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, and polarization—a measure of how much we distrust one another—is at a high point.

“What happens when we have eroded trust in media, government, and experts?” says Farid. “If you don’t trust me and I don’t trust you, how do we respond to pandemics, or climate change, or have fair and open elections? This is how authoritarianism arises—when you erode trust in institutions.”

The human gut microbiome is diverse and dominated by trillions of bacteria with as many as one-thousand different bacterial species. These microbes thrive in the harsh conditions of the gut and are heavily involved in maintaining healthy nutrition, normal metabolism, and proper immune function. They aid in the digestion of non-digestible carbohydrates, the metabolism of bile acid and drugs, and in the synthesis of amino acids and many vitamins. A number of gut microbes also produce antimicrobial substances that protect against pathogenic bacteria.

Microbiota of the oral cavity number in the millions and include archaea, bacteria, fungi, protists, and viruses. These organisms exist together and most in a mutualistic relationship with the host, where both the microbes and the host benefit from the relationship. While the majority of oral microbes are beneficial, preventing harmful microbes from colonizing the mouth, some have been known to become pathogenic in response to environmental changes. Bacteria are the most numerous of the oral microbes and include Streptococcus, Actinomyces, Lactobacterium, Staphylococcus, and Propionibacterium.

“It is hard to look at increasing trends in media consumption of all types, media multitasking and rates of ADHD in young people and not conclude that there is a decrease in their attention span,

Emerging research suggests that watching short, fast-paced videos makes it harder for kids to sustain activities that don’t offer instant—and constant—gratification.

One of the few studies specifically examining TikTok-related effects on the brain focused on Douyin, the TikTok equivalent in China, made by the same Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd. It found that the personalized videos the app’s recommendation engine shows users activate the reward centers of the brain, as compared with the general-interest videos shown to new users.

Brain scans of Chinese college students showed that areas involved in addiction were highly activated in those who watched personalized videos.

It also found some people have trouble controlling when to stop watching.

attention. “If kids’ brains become accustomed to constant changes, the brain finds it difficult to adapt to a nondigital activity where things don’t move quite as fast,”

A TikTok spokeswoman said the company wants younger teens to develop positive digital habits early on, and that it recently made some changes aimed at curbing extensive app usage. For example, TikTok won’t allow users ages 13 to 15 to receive push notifications after 9 p.m. TikTok also periodically reminds users to take a break to go outside or grab a snack.

Kids have a hard time pulling away from videos on YouTube, too, and Google has made several changes to help limit its use, including turning off autoplay by default on accounts of people under 18.

When kids do things that require prolonged focus, such as reading or solving math problems, they’re using directed attention

This function starts in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision making and impulse control.

“Directed attention is the ability to inhibit distractions and sustain attention and to shift attention appropriately. It requires higher-order skills like planning and prioritizing,”

Kids generally have a harder time doing this—and putting down their videogame controllers—because the prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until age 25.

“We speculate that individuals with lower self-control ability have more difficulty shifting attention away from favorite video stimulation,

“In the short-form snackable world, you’re getting quick hit after quick hit, and as soon as it’s over, you have to make a choice,” said Mass General’s Dr. Marci, who wrote the new book “Rewired: Protecting Your Brain in the Digital Age.” The more developed the prefrontal cortex, the better the choices.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that gets released in the brain when it’s expecting a reward. A flood of dopamine reinforces cravings for something enjoyable, whether it’s a tasty meal, a drug or a funny TikTok video.

“TikTok is a dopamine machine,” said John Hutton, a pediatrician and director of the Reading & Literacy Discovery Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. “If you want kids to pay attention, they need to practice paying attention.”

Researchers are just beginning to conduct long-term studies on digital media’s effects on kids’ brains. The National Institutes of Health is funding a study of nearly 12,000 adolescents as they grow into adulthood to examine the impact that many childhood experiences—from social media to smoking—have on cognitive development.

she predicts they will find that when brains repeatedly process rapid, rewarding content, their ability to process less-rapid, less-rewarding things “may change or be harmed.”

“It’s like we’ve made kids live in a candy store and then we tell them to ignore all that candy and eat a plate of vegetables,”

“We have an endless flow of immediate pleasures that’s unprecedented in human history.”

Parents and kids can take steps to boost attention, but it takes effort

Swap screen time for real time. Exercise and free play are among the best ways to build attention during childhood,

“Depriving kids of tech doesn’t work, but simultaneously reducing it and building up other things, like playing outside, does,”

Practice restraint.

“When you practice stopping, it strengthens those connections in the brain to allow you to stop again next time.”

Use tech’s own tools. TikTok has a screen-time management setting that allows users to cap their app usage.

Ensure good sleep. Teens are suffering from a sleep deficit.

How Synesthesia WorksScientists have yet to make a definitive determination of the mechanism of synesthesia. It may be due to increased cross-talk between specialized regions of the brain. Another possible mechanism is that inhibition in a neural pathway is reduced in synesthetes, allowing multi-sensory processing of stimuli. Some researchers believe synesthesia is based on the way the brain extracts and assigns the meaning of a stimulus (ideasthesia).

Who Has Synesthesia?Julia Simner, a psychologist studying synesthesia at of the University of Edinburgh, estimates at least 4% of the population has synesthesia and that over 1% of people have grapheme-color synesthesia (colored numbers and letters). More women have synesthesia than men. Some research suggests the incidenc

Can You Develop Synesthesia?There are documented cases of non-synesthetes developing synesthesia. Specifically, head trauma, stroke, brain tumors, and temporal lobe epilepsy may produce synesthesia. Temporary synesthesia may result from exposure to the psychedelic drugs mescaline or LSD, from sensory deprivation, or from meditation.

Some experts displayed a top-down style of reasoning: politics as a deductive art. They started with a big-idea premise about human nature, society, or economics and applied it to the specifics of the case. They tended to reach more confident conclusions about the future. And the positions they reached were easier to classify ideologically: that is the Keynesian prediction and that is the free-market fundamentalist prediction and that is the worst-case environmentalist prediction and that is the best case technology-driven growth prediction etc. Other experts displayed a bottom-up style of reasoning: politics as a much messier inductive art. They reached less confident conclusions and they are more likely to draw on a seemingly contradictory mix of ideas in reaching those conclusions (sometimes from the left, sometimes from the right). We called the big-idea experts “hedgehogs” (they know one big thing) and the more eclectic experts “foxes” (they know many, not so big things).

The most consistent predictor of consistently more accurate forecasts was “style of reasoning”: experts with the more eclectic, self-critical, and modest cognitive styles tended to outperform the big-idea people (foxes tended to outperform hedgehogs).

Lehrer: Can non-experts do anything to encourage a more effective punditocracy?

Tetlock: Yes, non-experts can encourage more accountability in the punditocracy. Pundits are remarkably skillful at appearing to go out on a limb in their claims about the future, without actually going out on one. For instance, they often “predict” continued instability and turmoil in the Middle East (predicting the present) but they virtually never get around to telling you exactly what would have to happen to disconfirm their expectations. They are essentially impossible to pin down. If pundits felt that their public credibility hinged on participating in level playing field forecasting exercises in which they must pit their wits against an extremely difficult-to-predict world, I suspect they would be learn, quite quickly, to be more flexible and foxlike in their policy pronouncements.

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The FAA says it’s impressed and is moving forward with recommendations Boston has made.

. A working group is forming to evaluate the main recommendation to slow departing jets to a speed limit of 220 knots during the climb to 10,000 feet, down from 250 knots.

New routes put planes over quiet communities. Complaints soared. Phoenix neighborhoods sued the FAA; Chicago neighborhoods are pushing for rotating runway use. Neighborhoods from California to Washington, D.C., are fighting the new procedures that airlines and the FAA insist are vital to future travel.

“It’s a concentration problem. It’s a frequency problem. It’s not really a noise problem.”

“The flights wake you up. We get a lot of complaints from young families with children,” says Mr. Wright, a data analyst who works from home for a major health-care company.

In Boston, an analysis suggested only 54% of the complaints Massport received resulted from noise louder than 45 decibels—about the level of background noise. When it’s relentless, you notice it more.

With a 30-knot reduction, noise directly under the flight track would decrease by between 1.5 and 5 decibels and the footprint on the ground would get a lot skinnier, sharply reducing the number of people affected, Mr. Hansman says.

The industry trade association Airlines for America has offered cautious support of the Boston recommendations. In a statement, the group said the changes must be safe, work with a variety of aircraft and not reduce the airport’s capacity for takeoffs and landings.

Air-traffic controllers will need to delay a departure a bit to put more room between a slower plane and a faster one, or modify its course slightly.

Adobe ADBE 7.19%increase; green up pointing triangle, maker of the Photoshop, released a new tool in Firefly, its generative-AI image suite, that lets you change and add in parts of a photo with AI imagery. Earlier this month, Google showed off a new Magic Editor, initially for Pixel phones, that allows you to easily manipulate a scene. And people are all over TikTok posting the results of AI headshot services like Try It On.

After testing a mix of AI editing and generating tools, I just have one question for all of you armchair philosophers: What even is a photo anymore?

I have always wondered what I’d look like as a naval officer. Now I don’t have to. I snapped a selfie and uploaded it to Adobe Firefly’s generative-fill tool. One click of the Background button and my cluttered office was wiped out. I typed “American flag” and in it went. Then I selected the Add tool, erased my torso and typed in “naval uniform.” Boom! Adobe even found me worthy of numerous awards and decorations.

Astronaut, fighter pilot, pediatrician. I turned myself into all of them in under a minute each. The AI-generated images did have noticeable issues: The uniforms were strange and had odd lettering, the stethoscope seemed to be cut in half and the backgrounds were warped and blurry. Yet the final images are fun, and the quality will only get better. 

In FaceApp, for iOS and Android, I was able to change my frown to a smile—with the right amount of teeth! I was also able to add glasses and change my hair color. Some said it looked completely real, others who know me well figured something was up. “Your teeth look too perfect.”

The real reality-bending happens in Midjourney, which can turn text prompts into hyper-realistic images and blend existing images in new ways. The image quality of generated images exceeds OpenAI’s Dall-E and Adobe’s Firefly.

it’s more complicated to use, since it runs through the chat app Discord. Sign up for service, access the Midjourney bot through your Discord account (via web or app), then start typing in prompts. My video producer Kenny Wassus started working with a more advanced Midjourney plugin called Insight Face Swap-Bot, which allows you to sub in a face to a scene you’ve already made. He’s become a master—making me a Game of Thrones warrior and a Star Wars rebel, among other things.

We’re headed for a time when we won’t be able to tell how manipulated a photo is, what parts are real or fake.

when influential messages are conveyed through images—be they news or misinformation—people have reason to know a photo’s origin and what’s been done to it.

Firefly adds a “content credential,” digital information baked into the file, that says the image was manipulated with AI. Adobe is pushing to get news, tech and social-media platforms to use this open-source standard so we can all understand where the images we see came from.

So, yeah, our ability to spot true photos might depend on the cooperation of the entire internet. And by “true photo,” I mean one that captures a real moment—where you’re wearing your own boring clothes and your hair is just so-so, but you have the exact right number of teeth in your head.

Silver linings aside, it will take many, many more instances of coordinated response to stop a movement generations in the making. In more than a decade of studying the earlier white power movement, I have become familiar with the themes of underground activity that are today clearly drawing from the earlier movement. In the absence of decisive action across multiple institutions, a rich record of criminal activity and violence will continue to provide these activists with a playbook for further chaos.

The Base, furthermore, is what experts call "accelerationist," meaning that its members hope to provoke what they see as an inevitable race war. They have conducted paramilitary training in the Pacific Northwest. Both of these strategies date back to the 1980s, when the Order trained in those forests with hopes of provoking the same race war.

One of the men arrested Thursday was formerly a reservist in the Canadian Army, where he received training in explosives and demolition, according to the New York Times. This kind of preparation, too, is common among extremists like these. To take just a few representative examples, in the 1960s, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Marine trained in demolition, helped fellow members of the United Klans of America to bomb the 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church, killing four black girls.

This news out of Virginia shows that there is a real social benefit when people direct their attention to these events -- and sustain the public conversation about the presence of a renewed white-power movement and what it means for our society.

There is much to be said, however, for art’s ability to evoke emotion based on common experience, sincerity, talent, and unique skill. Rich proves that AI can be used to answer complicated questions. But what we think of as creative work in the humanities is much more often about asking questions than it is about answering them.

Stability Versus ReactivitySometimes a species with low reactivity is called "stable", but care should be taken to make the context clear. Stability can also refer to slow radioactive decay or to the transition of electrons from the excited state to less energetic levels (as in luminescence). A nonreactive species may be called "inert". However, most inert species actually do react under the right conditions to form complexes and compounds (e.g., higher atomic number noble gases).

While you can't ordinarily see both red and green or both blue and yellow, visual scientist Hewitt Crane and his colleague Thomas Piantanida published a paper in Science claiming such perception was possible. In their 1983 paper "On Seeing Reddish Green and Yellowish Blue" they claimed volunteers viewing adjacent red and green stripes could see reddish green, while viewers of adjacent yellow and blue stripes could see yellowish blue. The researchers used an eye tracker to hold the

The impossible colors reddish green and yellowish blue are imaginary colors that do not occur in the light spectrum. Another type of imaginary color is a chimerical color. A chimerical color is seen by looking at a color until the cone cells are fatigued and then looking at a different color. This produces an afterimage perceived by the brain, not the eyes.Examples of chimerical colors include:Self-luminous colors: Self-luminous colors appear to glow even though no light is emitted. An

Stygian colors: Stygian colors are dark and supersaturated. For example, "stygian blue" may be seen by staring at bright yellow and then looking at black. The normal afterimage is dark blue. When viewed against black, the resulting blue is as dark as black, yet colored. Stygian colors appear on black because certain neurons only fire signals in the dark.Hyperbolic colors:

Impossible colors like reddish green or yellowish blue are trickier to see. To try to see these colors, put a yellow object and blue object right next to each other and cross your eyes so that the two objects overlap. The same procedure works for green and red. The overlapping region may appear to be a mix of the two colors (i.e., green for blue and yellow, brown for red and green), a field of dots of the component colors, or an unfamiliar color that is both red/green or yellow/blue at once!

Fractals and Infinity A fractal may be magnified over and over, to infinity, always revealing more detail. PhotoviewPlus / Getty Images A fractal is an abstract mathematical object, used in art and to simulate natural phenomena. Written as a mathematical equation, most fractals are nowhere differentiable. When viewing an image of a fractal, this means you could zoom in and see new detail. In other words, a fractal is infinitely magnifiable.The Koch snowflake is an interesting example of a fractal. The snowflake starts as an equilateral triangle. For each iteration of the fractal:Each line segment is divided into three equal segments.

Cosmology and Infinity Even if the universe is finite, it might be one of an infinite number of "bubbles.". Detlev van Ravenswaay / Getty Images Cosmologists study the universe and ponder infinity. Does space go on and on without end? This remains an open question. Even if the physical universe as we know it has a boundary, there is still the multiverse theory to consider. Our universe may be but one in an infinite number of them.

Cognitive errors result from incomplete information or the inability to analyze the information that is available. These cognitive errors can be classified as either belief perseverance or processing errors

Processing errors occur when an individual fails to manage and organize information properly, which can be due in part to the mental effort required to compute and analyze data.

Conservatism bias, where people emphasize original, pre-existing information over new data.

Base rate neglect is the opposite effect, whereby people put too little emphasis on the original information. 

Confirmation bias, where people seek information that affirms existing beliefs while discounting or discarding information that might contradict them.

Anchoring and Adjustment happens when somebody fixates on a target number, such as the result of a calculation or valuation.

Hindsight bias occurs when people perceive actual outcomes as reasonable and expected, but only after the fact.

Sample size neglect is an error made when people infer too much from a too-small sample size.

Mental accounting is when people earmark certain funds for certain goals and keep them separate. When this happens, the risk and reward of projects undertaken to achieve these goals are not considered as an overall portfolio and the effect of one on another is ignored.

Availability bias, or recency bias skews perceived future probabilities based on memorable past events

Framing bias is when a person will process the same information differently depending on how it is presented and received.

Cognitive errors in the way people process and analyze information can lead them to make irrational decisions which can negatively impact business or investing decisions

. These information processing errors could have arisen to help primitive humans survive in a time before money or finance came into existence.

Through ongoing research, McGowan has found out a lot about animal cognition and feelings. In a study done in 2015, McGowan found that a human’s presence leads to increased blood flow to a dog’s eyes, ears and paws, which means the dog is excited.

Dogs have been studied for their empathy, as well. A 2012 study examined dogs’ behavior towards distressed humans that weren’t their owners. While the study concluded that dogs display an empathy-like behavior, the scientists writing the re

Numerous other studies on dog behavior, emotion, and intelligence have found that dogs “eavesdrop” on human interactions to assess who is mean to their owner and who isn’t and that dogs follow their human’s gaze.These studies may just be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our learning about dogs. And as for doggie parents? Well, they may know a lot more than the rest of us, just by observing their best canine companions every day.

Trump's biggest fans have stuck by him and often reflect or echo his irrationality, discovering ever more extravagant ways to justify the president's behavior. (Krein's decision to renounce Trump was unusual.) When Trump attacked Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, Jerry Falwell Jr. of Liberty University tweeted his support, floating the idea that Sessions was an anti-Trump deep cover operative who endorsed Trump to undermine his presidency from within. It seems Trumpism is infectious. If this infection becomes a pandemic — a cult of personality — one could fairly call Trumpism a movement. But psychology would still be the best way to understand it.

The Bloomberg article cites a July meta-analysis in the medical journal Lancet, which found a tenuous link between higher temperatures and suicides and mental illness. But the study deems the collective evidence of “low certainty” owing to inconsistent study findings, methodologies, measured variables and definitions.

“climate change might not necessarily increase mental health issues because people might adapt over time, meaning that higher temperatures could become normal and not be experienced as anomalous or extreme.”

yes. Before the media began reporting on putative temperature records—the scientific evidence for which is also weak—heat waves were treated as a normal part of summer. Uncomfortable, but figuratively nothing to sweat about.

according to a World Health Organization report last year, the very “awareness of climate change and extreme weather events and their impacts” may lead to a host of ills, including strained social relationships, anxiety, depression, intimate-partner violence, helplessness, suicidal behavior and alcohol and substance abuse.

“First and foremost, it is imperative that adults understand that youth climate anxiety (also referred to as eco-anxiety, solastalgia, eco-guilt or ecological grief) is an emotionally and cognitively functional response to real existential threats,” a May 10 editorial in the journal Nature explained. “Although feelings of powerlessness, grief and fear can be profoundly disruptive—particularly for young people unaccustomed to the depth and complexity of such feelings—it is important to acknowledge that this response is a rational one.”

Forty-five percent claimed they were so worried that they struggled to function on a daily basis, the definition of an anxiety disorder.

A study in 2021 of 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries including the U.S. reported that 59% were very or extremely worried about climate change, and 84% were at least moderately worried

These anxieties are no more rational than the threats from climate change are existential.

A more apt term for such fear is climate hypochondria.

The New Yorker magazine earlier this month published a 4,400-word piece titled “What to Do With Climate Emotions” by Jia Tolentino, a woman in the throes of such neurosis

Ms. Tolentino goes on to describe how climate therapists can help patients cope. “The goal is not to resolve the intrusive feeling and put it away” but, as one therapist advises her, “to aim for a middle ground of sustainable distress.” Even the climate left’s despair must be “sustainable.”

there’s nothing normal about climate anxiety, despite the left’s claims to the contrary.

Progressives may even use climate change to displace their other anxieties—for instance, about having children

Displacement is a maladaptive mechanism by which people redirect negative emotions from one thing to another

Climate hypochondriacs deserve to be treated with compassion, much like anyone who suffers from mental illness. They shouldn’t, however, expect everyone else to enable their neuroses.

Over the past four years, more than 1,600 cybercrime cases on TikTok have been reported to authorities, said Kuber Kadayat, a Nepal police spokesman. He said most of the complaints were related to sharing nude photos or financial extortion.

Last week, the government said it would require social-media companies running platforms used in Nepal to set up liaison offices in the country.

India banned TikTok—citing threats to national security—along with dozens of other Chinese apps in 2020 after a clash between Indian and Chinese troops on the countries’ disputed border.

Nepal isn’t the first to cite concerns about the content shared on the app. Pakistan has banned the app multiple times after authorities received complaints of indecent content, later lifting the bans after receiving promises from TikTok to better control the content. In August, Senegal blocked access to the app citing hateful and subversive content being shared on it.