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Despite all the reports of ghost sightings (28 percent of Americans report having ghostly encounters), there’s zero evidence to support the presence of supernatural beings among us. Science may not prove the existence of ghosts, but it can help explain why people think they see ghosts in the first place.

Psychologists have found that people have a tendency to rely too heavily on the very first piece of information they learn, which can have a serious impact on the decision they end up making.

In one example, participants spun a wheel to select a number between 0 and 100. The volunteers were then asked to adjust that number up or down to indicate how many African countries were in the U.N. Those who spun a high number gave higher estimates while those who spun a low number gave lower estimates. In each case, the participants were using that initial number as their anchor point to base their decision.

You read online that the average price of the vehicle you are interested in is $27,000 dollars. When you are shopping at the local car lot, the dealer offers you the same vehicle for $26,500, which you quickly accept—after all, it's $500 less than what you were expecting to pay. Except, the car dealer across town is offering the exact same vehicle for just $24,000, a full $2,500 less than what you paid and $3,000 less than the average price you found online.

Kris Karnauskas, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of Colorado, has started walking around campus with a pocket-size carbon-dioxide detector. He’s not doing it to measure the amount of carbon pollution in the atmosphere. He’s interested in the amount of CO₂ in each room.

The indoor concentration of carbon dioxide concerns him—and not only for the usual reason. Karnauskas is worried that indoor CO₂ levels are getting so high that they are starting to impair human cognition.

Carbon dioxide, the same odorless and invisible gas that causes global warming, may be making us dumber.

grief is the price we all pay for love. 

The animal had given us nothing and had taken nothing from us in return.

  It is as if our discovery constitutes an encounter that reminds us of the interconnectedness of life. 

Law enforcement accountability is missing in the justice system.

The Supreme Court could decide soon whether it will take a closer look at a legal doctrine it created nearly 40 years ago that critics say is shielding law enforcement and government officials from accountability. Defenders argue that it protects an officer's ability to make a snap decision during potentially dangerous situations.

"When the Supreme Court grants qualified immunity ... it sends a message to law enforcement that there are not consequences for violating the law and it sends the message to the people that their rights don't matter,"

"It is difficult to predict how organisms will respond to changes in extreme events because these events tend to be, by definition, quite rare," Botero said. "But we can have a pretty good idea of how any given species may respond to current changes in this aspect of climate -- if we pay attention to its natural history, and have some idea of the climatic regime it has experienced in the past."

develop an evolutionary model of how populations respond to rare environmental extremes. (Think: 500-year floods.) These rare events can be tricky for evolution because it is difficult to adapt to hazards that are almost never encountered

Haaland and Botero also found that factors speeding up trait evolution are generally likely to hinder -- rather than favor -- adaptation to rare selection events. Part of the reason: High mutation rates tend to facilitate the process of adaptation to normal conditions during the long intervals in between environmental extremes.

YouTube wants to recommend things people will like, and the clearest signal of that is whether other people liked them. Pew found that 64 percent of recommendations went to videos with more than a million views. The 50 videos that YouTube recommended most often had been viewed an average of 456 million times each. Popularity begets popularity, at least in the case of users (or bots, as here) that YouTube doesn’t know much about.

So, the challenge becomes how to recommend “new videos that users want to watch” when those videos are new to the system and low in views. (Finding fresh, potentially hot videos is important, YouTube researchers have written, for “propagating viral content.”)

The system learns from a video’s early performance, and if it does well, views can grow rapidly. In one case, a highly recommended kids’ video went from 34,000 views when Pew first encountered it in July to 30 million in August.

As I read about Irpin, about Bucha, about Trostyanets, of the bodies crushed by tanks, of the bicyclists shot on the street, of the desecrated corpses, there it was, “рашизм,” again and again

Grasping its meaning requires crossing differences in alphabet and pronunciation, thinking our way into the experience of a bilingual society at war with a fascist empire.

“Pашизм” sounds like “fascism,” but with an “r” sound instead of an “f” at the beginning; it means, roughly, “Russian fascism.”

For centuries, people have witnessed unexplained lights in the sky and thought that perhaps they might be ghosts or angels. However, it was in the summer of 1947 when a different explanation became popular. Following a widely reported incident over Mt. Rainier in Washington state, people began to believe that these unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are actually alien spacecraft prowling the Earth.

Over the past 70 years, more than ten thousand similar reports have been made.

The problem is that many people jump directly from the “unidentified” in “UFO” to “flying saucer.” And that’s just too large a jump to be reasonable. There is simply no credible evidence that the Earth is being visited by aliens. There are no artifacts, no clear photographs, no captured aliens, no alien bodies – nothing.

After Jason Moore, from Portland, Oregon, saw headlines from national news sources on Google News about the Buffalo shooting at a local supermarket on Saturday afternoon, he did a quick search for the incident on Wikipedia. When no results appeared, he drafted a single sentence: "On May 14, 2022, 10 people were killed in a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York." He hit save and published the entry on Wikipedia in less than a minute.

That article, which as of Friday has been viewed more than 900,000 times, has since undergone 1,071 edits by 223 editors who've voluntarily updated the page on the internet's free and largest crowdsourced encyclopedia.

He's credited with creating 50,000 entries

The Cuban American author Margarita Engle explores what it's like to be an outsider in her new middle-grade novel Singing with Elephants.

Engle tells Morning Edition she wanted to imagine how it would feel for a child to live near an accomplished poet and to wonder if she could write poetry too. Singing with Elephants is told in verse.

Ten years ago, publishers put the Spanish in italics so people didn't really think of it as bilingual in the same way, because the Spanish was kind of separated by the italics.

Every few years, it seems, there is a new bestselling Big History book. And not infrequently, they have rather grandiose titles.

, I hope to convince you why I think this book will stand the test of time better.

First, rather than one author’s pet theory, The Dawn of Everything is the brainchild of two outspoken writers: anthropologist David Graeber (a figurehead in the Occupy Wall Street movement and author of e.g. Bullshit Jobs) and archaeologist David Wengrow (author of e.g. What Makes Civilization?). I expect a large part of their decade-long collaboration consisted of shooting holes in each other’s arguments

A student of Girard’s while at Stanford in the late 1980s, Thiel would go on to report, in several interviews, and somewhat more sub-rosa in his 2014 book, From Zero to One, that Girard is his greatest intellectual inspiration. He is in the habit of recommending Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978) to others in the tech industry.

Michel Serres, another French theorist long resident at Stanford, and a strong advocate for Girard’s ideas, has described Girard as the “Darwin of the human sciences”, and has identified the mimetic theory as the relevant analog in the humanities of the Darwinian theory of natural selection.

For Girard, everything is imitation. Or rather, every human action that rises above “merely” biological appetite and that is experienced as desire for a given object, in fact is not a desire for that object itself, but a desire to have the object that somebody else already has

Sometimes it’s better to be inefficient

a countertrend growing as digital technologies began to take off with the advent of smartphones, streaming services and social media. The more we rely on digital technology for work, learning and socializing, “the more we seek out analog alternatives as a balance or a different way of engaging with the world,”

the trend isn’t driven by older generations seeking nostalgia but rather “by younger people who may have even never encountered this technology in the first place,

Present bias shows up not just in experiments, of course, but in the real world. Especially in the United States, people egregiously undersave for retirement—even when they make enough money to not spend their whole paycheck on expenses, and even when they work for a company that will kick in additional funds to retirement plans when they contribute.

hen people hear the word bias, many if not most will think of either racial prejudice or news organizations that slant their coverage to favor one political position over another. Present bias, by contrast, is an example of cognitive bias—the collection of faulty ways of thinking that is apparently hardwired into the human brain. The collection is large. Wikipedia’s “List of cognitive biases” contains 185 entries, from actor-observer bias (“the tendency for explanations of other individuals’ behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation … and for explanations of one’s own behaviors to do the opposite”) to the Zeigarnik effect (“uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones”)

If I had to single out a particular bias as the most pervasive and damaging, it would probably be confirmation bias. That’s the effect that leads us to look for evidence confirming what we already think or suspect, to view facts and ideas we encounter as further confirmation, and to discount or ignore any piece of evidence that seems to support an alternate view

this may be a good time to explore what psychologists and philosophers say are the most effective ways to argue

And by “argue” they do not mean “quarrel,” but communicate without rancor or faulty reasoning with someone who has an opposing viewpoint, with the hope of broadening one’s understanding of people and ideas.

Listen carefully

This poor posture can lead not only to back and neck issues but psychological ones as well, including lower self-esteem and mood, decreased assertiveness and productivity, and an increased tendency to recall negative things

Intense device usage can exhaust your eyes and cause eye strain, according to the Mayo Clinic, and can lead to symptoms such as headaches, difficulty concentrating, and watery, dry, itchy, burning, sore, or tired eyes. Overuse can also cause blurred or double vision and increased sensitivity to light.

Using your devices too much before bedtime can lead to insomnia.

Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.

At first, the patient population was tipped toward what used to be the “traditional” instance of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present as—who wanted to be—a girl. 

Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.