Science

“The future is psychedelic,” declared Rick Doblin, founder of Lykos Therapeutics, at a conference on psychedelic drugs last year. Several studies, many of them funded by Lykos, had provided tantalising signs that pairing MDMA with talk therapy could dramatically reduce symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As a result, Doblin was one of many advocates touting the drug as key to revolutionising mental healthcare.

But just a year later,…

The deadliest hurricane to strike the US mainland since Hurricane Katrina has also drawn attention for its potential disruptions to the tech industry. Destruction from Hurricane Helene is threatening one of the industry’s major supply chains – a North Carolina mining town that supplies high-purity quartz crucial for manufacturing the chips found in smartphones and data centres worldwide.

The mining town of Spruce Pine is among the many US communities impacted by Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 200 people in multiple states, displaced thousands and left more than a million homes and businesses without power. The storm pushed 900 kilometres inland from the Florida coast and inflicted deadly floods across a wide region, even reaching deep within the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, where the Spruce Pine quartz mines are located.

Here is what you need to know about how Helene’s ripple effects could impact the tech industry.

Why is high-purity quartz so important?

High-purity quartz is used to make fused-quartz crucibles, cylindrical containers that are key to the chip-manufacturing process because they can endure the high temperatures required to melt silicon. The melting-point temperature for semiconductor-grade polysilicon is around 1425°C (2597°F), and quartz crucibles can typically withstand temperatures of up to 1650°C (3000°F).

In the chip manufacturing process, the fused-quartz crucibles are filled with molten silicon. A silicon seed crystal is dipped into the melted silicon within the spinning crucible so that it can grow into a significantly larger silicon ingot before being gradually drawn out. A fully grown ingot can weigh over 500 kilograms.

Those silicon ingots are then cut into silicon wafers, which in turn can be imprinted with the transistor patterns that form the foundation of modern computer chips.

Where does high-purity quartz come from?

The natural deposits of quartz found in Spruce Pine originated when North America and Africa collided to form the supercontinent Pangaea about 300 million years ago. That process created the Appalachian mountains and also forced part of Earth’s oceanic crust to sink beneath North America, where the intense heat and pressure near the planet’s mantle melted ocean sediment and rock.

The resulting lava slowly cooled over time to form pegmatite rock deposits containing large mineral crystals – including high-purity quartz. These pegmatite formations eventually became more accessible near the surface because of more geological upheaval and weathering.

How did Hurricane Helene impact quartz mining operations?

The Spruce Pine mining district currently has quartz mining and refining operations owned by Belgium-based Sibelco and Norway-based The Quartz Corp. Both companies shut down operations on 26 September and have not yet said when they might restart.

The companies say they have confirmed the safety of their employees and contractors in the area – and they described relatively minimal direct damage to their facilities.

“The initial assessment indicates that our operating facilities in the Spruce Pine region have only sustained minor damage,” said Sibelco in a 3 October statement. “Our dedicated teams are on-site, conducting cleanup and repair activities to restart operations as soon as we can.”

“We have been able to conduct the first visual inspections of our plants and it would appear that damage is mostly concentrated around ancillary units,” said The Quartz Corp in a statement on 2 October. But the company also cautioned that resumption of mining operations “will also depend on the rebuilding of local infrastructure” – many of the roads in the area were closed and damaged in the immediate wake of the storm.

Similarly, Sibelco referenced power outages from the storm as one challenge. “Restoring power remains crucial to resuming our operations,” said the company in its statement. “The repair of power lines leading to our plants has progressed significantly.”

The Quartz Corp also described having stockpiles of quartz in Norway that could be used in ongoing purification processing operations, along with additional “safety stocks of finished products” that could avoid any critical shortages for customers – including semiconductor manufacturers – in the short or medium term.

Will Helene disrupt the supply of semiconductors?

Major semiconductor manufacturers have said that they currently do not expect disruptions to their operations in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

TSMC, a Taiwanese company that is the world’s leading chip maker, described having “diverse global suppliers” to draw upon. “Through an effective risk management system and close partnerships with suppliers, we currently do not anticipate any significant impact on the company’s operations,” says a TSMC spokesperson. “We will keep monitoring the situation closely.”

Samsung Electronics, which ranks as the second largest chip maker and is headquartered in South Korea, told New Scientist that the company’s operations were not affected.

GlobalFoundries, the largest semiconductor manufacturer based in the US, described itself as having the “flexibility to leverage alternative sources for key supplies” with chip-making facilities on three continents. “We are in contact with our global suppliers and do not expect any disruption to our supply of quartz due to Hurricane Helene,” says a GlobalFoundries spokesperson.

Companies that produce raw silicon wafers currently have wafer stockpiles sufficient to last anywhere from three to eight months, said Dylan Patel at SemiAnalysis, an independent research firm, in a social media post.

Are there alternative sources of quartz for the global semiconductor industry?

Spruce Pine “has a near unique combination of purity, availability and price,” wrote Ed Conway, a journalist at Sky News and author of Material World, in a Substack post. But he also pointed to other high-purity quartz mines in China, Russia and Brazil.

Natural high-purity quartz deposits are “scarce”, but companies can use purification methods if needed or even synthetically produce pure quartz, said Patel. He also pointed to the company Ferroglobe, which acquired a high-purity quartz mine in South Carolina in October 2023. A company press release projected that mining operations could begin in the second half of 2024.

For the past 20 years, Yelp has been providing a platform for people to share their experiences at businesses ranging from bars to barbershops. According to the company, in that time the platform has published 287 million user reviews of over 600,000 businesses.

There’s a reason review sites like Yelp are so popular. No one wants to spend their hard-earned money on a dud product, or fork over cash for a bad meal. So we’ll seek advice from strangers and use various clues to judge if a particular review is authentic and reliable.

But sometimes these cues can lead shoppers down the wrong path. Other times, the reviews are simply fake.

I’m a linguist who studies “word of mouth,” or what people tell each other about their experiences. Advances in text analysis have allowed researchers like me to detect patterns and draw conclusions from millions of product reviews.

Here are some key findings from research that I and others in my field have conducted:

Signs of foul play

How can you tell if the review you’re reading is sincere?

Competition might sometimes push businesses to pay people to compose positive reviews for their products or negative reviews for competitors. Bots can also manufacture fake reviews that sound like they’ve been written by humans.

As a result, fake reviews have become a big problem that threatens to delegitimize online reviews altogether.

For example, a recent study estimates that fake reviews compel consumers to waste 12 cents for every dollar they spend online.

The reality is that people do a pretty poor job at discerning a fake review from a real one. It’s essentially a coin flip—studies have shown that shoppers can correctly identify a fake review only half of the time.

Researchers have also tried to identify what characterizes a fake review. They’ve proposed that those that are too long or too short, in addition to those that don’t use the past tense or a first-person pronoun.

Yelp has long been well aware of the issue. The company developed an algorithm that identifies and filters out “unhelpful” reviews—and that includes reviews that are too short.

It’s important to think about the difference between how you might write a review after you’ve tried a product, or if you’re coming up with something out of thin air.

In a 2023 study, my colleagues and I suggested that the main difference lies in whether specific language is used. For example, a real review will contain words that are more concrete and describe the “what, where, when” of the experience.

By contrast, if someone hasn’t actually stayed at, say, the hotel they are reviewing, or didn’t dine at the restaurant they are writing about, they’ll use abstract generalities loosely related to the experience.

It’s the difference between reading, in a review, “The room was clean and the beach was nice” and “The room was so clean, we felt like it was new. A sandy beach was steps away, which allowed us to easily take a dip after our hike. The shimmering ocean water also made the view from the window special.”

Real reviews can still mislead

Even if all fake reviews were filtered out, do product reviews still help you make better decisions?

As is often the case in marketing research, it depends.

Researchers have delved into this question for years and can point to a variety of review features that can help your decision making.

For example, you might assume that if you’ve read a few reviews for a product, and they are similar to each other, this means there is a consensus about the product. Indeed, studies have shown that similarity across opinions is more likely to make readers more certain.

My research shows that similar reviews increase consumer certainty about the product. However, I’ve also found that these similar reviews are more likely to be written by consumers who are less certain about their experience with the product. It’s likely that they simply repeated what others said in their reviews, pulling from those reviews to craft their own.

This creates a paradox. Readers of reviews that sound similar will be more certain that they’re making the correct decision, even as the writers of those same reviews were less certain. At the same time, reviews that differ from each other will elicit hesitancy in readers, even though the writers of the review were in fact more certain about their experiences.

The text isn’t the only element that influences readers. In ongoing research, I discovered that the sheer number of available reviews on a platform can influence how you perceive each individual review.

So, if you’re reading a review and it is one of, say, 1,572 reviews, you’ll think it is a more credible review than if that same review was one of, say, 72 reviews.

This might seem illogical, but it can be explained by the human tendency to take quantity as a sign of quality: If a product has many reviews, this could mean that it’s popular and that many people have purchased it. A halo effect occurs, and you then subconsciously believe that everything about the product—including its reviews—is better.

But for the most part, despite these issues and others, consumers still make better purchasing decisions with reviews than without them.

It’s just a matter of knowing what to look out for.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Should young people be paid less than their older counterparts, even if they’re working the same job? Whether you think it’s fair or not, it’s been standard practice in many industries for a long time.

The argument is that young people are not fully “work-ready” and require more intensive employer support to develop the right skills for their job.

But change could be on the horizon. Major unions and some politicians are pushing for reform—arguing “youth wages” should be scrapped entirely for adults.

Why? They say the need to be fairly paid for equal work effort, as well as economic considerations such as the high cost of living and ongoing housing crisis, mean paying young adults less based on their age is out of step with modern Australia.

So is there a problem with our current system, and if so, how might we go about fixing it?

What are youth wages?

In Australia, a youth wage or junior pay rate is paid as an increasing percentage of an award’s corresponding full adult wage until an employee reaches the age of 21.

This isn’t the case in every industry—some awards require all adults to be paid the same minimum rates.

But for those not covered by a specific award, as well as those working in industries including those covered by the General Retail Industry Award, Fast Food Industry Award and Pharmacy Industry Award, employees younger than 21 are not paid the full rate.

Why pay less?

Conventionally, junior rates have been thought of as a “training wage.” Younger people are typically less experienced, so as they gain more skills on the job over time, they are paid a higher hourly rate.

But there are a few key problems with this approach, which may not be relevant given many employers’ expectations for their workers to start “job-ready” and a lack of consistency in the training they provide.

Training up and developing skills is an important part of building any career. But it isn’t always provided by their employers.

Many young workers train themselves in job-related technical education and short courses, often at their own expense and prior to starting work.

Employers reap the benefit of this pre-employment training and so a “wage discount” for younger workers may be irrelevant in this instance.

None of this is to say employers aren’t offering something important when they take on young employees.

Younger workers coming into employment relatively early have access to more than just a paid job, but also become part of a team, with responsibilities and job requirements that support “bigger-picture” life skills.

Those who employ them may be contributing to their broader social and cultural engagement, something that could be considered part of a more inclusive training package. Whether that justifies a significant wage discount is less clear.

Calls for a rethink

There are growing calls for a rethink on the way we compensate young people for their efforts.

An application by the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association—the union for retail, fast food and warehousing workers—seeks to remove junior rates for adult employees on three key awards. This action will be heard by the Fair Work Commission next year.

Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, said the peak union body will lobby the government to legislate such changes if this application fails. The Greens have added their support.

That doesn’t have to mean abolishing youth wages altogether. But 21 years of age is a high threshold, especially given we get the right to major adult responsibilities such as voting and driving by 18.

A transition strategy could consider gradually lowering this threshold, or increasing the wage percentages over time.

Lessons from New Zealand

We wouldn’t be the first to make such a bold change if we did.

Our geographically and culturally close neighbor, New Zealand, has already removed the “youth wage”—replacing it with a “first job” rate and a training wage set at 80% of the full award rate in 2008.

A common argument against abolishing youth wages—and increasing the minimum wage in general—is that it will stop businesses hiring young people and thus increase unemployment.

But a 2021 study that examined the effects of New Zealand’s experience with increasing minimum wages—including this change—found little discernible difference in employment outcomes for young workers.

The authors did note, however, that New Zealand’s economic downturn post-2008 had a marked effect on the employment of young workers more generally.

What’s fair?

It’s easy to see how we arrived at the case for paying younger adults less. But younger workers should not bear the burden of intergenerational inequity by “losing out” on wages in the early part of their working life.

The debate we see now echoes the discussions about equal pay for equal work value run in the 1960s and ’70s in relation to women’s unequal pay.

We were warned that paying women the same as men would cause huge economic dislocation. Such a catastrophe simply did not come to pass.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

An international and interdisciplinary group of researchers has compiled a proposal for a new paradigm for economic performance and sustainability, promoting cooperation and ethical behavior as key drivers of economic success.

A team of researchers led by Associate Professor Jan Pfister from the University of Turku has introduced a forward-thinking approach to performance management, offering a vision for how businesses and organizations can achieve both economic success and sustainability.

In their publication in Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, the researchers introduce the “prosocial market economy” as a model designed to embed cooperation, ethical behavior, and sustainability into organizational practices.

This research reconsiders the focus on self-interest and short-term gains that dominate traditional economic frameworks. Instead, it argues that organizations fostering prosocial behaviors—those that prioritize collaboration and collective well-being—are more likely to succeed over time. The proposed prosocial market economy highlights ethical responsibility as a key driver of both superior performance and long-term sustainability.

One of the key insights of the research is a new framework for success; the researchers explain why and how organizations emphasizing cooperation and ethical behavior outperform those driven solely by self-interest.

Drawing on evolutionary theory and insights from Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, the study suggests that integrating the core design principles of prosocial groups into performance measurement and management practice fosters economic success. The study also highlights the role of sustainability: the prosocial market economy envisions businesses that can achieve economic success while contributing positively to environmental sustainability and social well-being.

“In the context of global challenges such as climate change, inequality, and resource depletion, this new model offers an alternative to traditional economic paradigms that prioritize short-term profits. The prosocial market economy provides a framework where business success and ethical responsibility coexist, helping companies address today’s complex demands while ensuring long-term viability and positive social impact,” explains Pfister.

This interdisciplinary research brought together experts from several institutions in Finland, the United Kingdom, U.S. and United Arab Emirates, and various fields, including accounting, management, and evolutionary biology.

The collaboration underscores the importance of integrating behavioral science and management studies to foster a more sustainable and cooperative economic system.

From theory to practice

The prosocial market economy offers practical tools for organizations across industries, both in the private and public sectors, providing business leaders with principles to design prosocial teams and foster collective success.

According to Pfister, “Our research clarifies why and how prosocial groups—those that prioritize shared success over individual gain—outperform groups driven purely by self-interest. This has profound implications for how we measure and manage performance, and how we cultivate organizational behavior that protects and nurtures a sustainable future.”

With increasing pressure from consumers, policymakers, and investors to embrace sustainable practices, this research moves beyond the conventional Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) debate, which often relies on external measurements.

The prosocial market economy focuses on transforming organizational cultures from within, embedding sustainability and cooperation into core values. This inside-out approach helps businesses foster genuine, lasting sustainability, avoiding greenwashing and the hypocrisy of superficial ESG compliance.

The prosocial market economy offers a pathway for organizations to be both economically successful and environmentally and socially responsible.

C-suites are filled with strong personalities that can help drive new and exciting offerings. But when it comes to breakthrough technological innovations, a new study published in Strategic Management Journal found it’s essential that CEO overconfidence is balanced by a board of directors with expertise and power.

To examine their hypotheses, the team used a sample of U.S. publicly listed firms within the S&P 1500 that operate in high-tech industries, as previous research has shown that breakthrough innovations—defined as something that significantly alters or creates markets—are especially important in these environments.

They focused on two board qualities: expertise and power. The importance of expertise is well studied in other areas such as acquisitions: Firms with boards that have experience in acquiring businesses make better decisions in this avenue. Having experience with breakthrough innovations is crucial, as it can help—for example—to ally investment concerns that board members might otherwise have.

Board power was measured in relation to how much independent sway the board has in relation to the CEO. This would be a board where the CEO is not the chair, or where board members have more tenure with the company than the CEO, or when members have a significant stake in the company. These board members are more likely to put pressure on the CEO to prove an idea is worth pursuing, and to ensure all necessary information is provided.

“The powerful board is necessary to make these adjustments or to rectify some misperceptions that may come with this overconfidence,” Kraft says.

“It’s not about stopping these CEOs from being innovative—it’s good that they want to go for innovation—but rather to guide them to really make better decisions in terms of the right projects, making adjustments in terms of resource allocation decisions, and also take into account new information that comes the further you get with a project.”

The researchers found that the relationship between CEO overconfidence and breakthrough innovations is strongest in firms with high board expertise and power, leading to a 113% increase in breakthrough innovations relative to the sample mean. Both expertise and power were found to be crucial, as they also discovered that powerful boards that lack expertise may be detrimental to harnessing CEO overconfidence.

“If you want to push breakthrough innovation in your firm, then you should be careful of the people you hire for your board,” Kraft says. “You should be surrounded by people that understand the topic, because they can give you good advice. But the company must also balance the power between the CEO and the board.”

American consumers view the economic impact of both trade and immigration more critically now than in 2020, according to the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers.

The share of consumers voicing support for increased trade fell from 68% in 2020 to 54% in 2024. Unlike four years ago, when a majority of consumers across every socioeconomic group believed increased trade would benefit the economy, views this year exhibit strong gradients by income, education and stock wealth, said Joanne Hsu, director of the surveys.

Consumers with less education, income and wealth hold much more negative views of trade than other consumers. Partisan gaps in opinions on trade are relatively modest: 69% of Democrats believe more trade benefits the economy, while 46% of Republicans agree, with Independents in the middle at 55%.

Surveys this year since May have asked consumers whether the economic policies debated by the presidential candidates would benefit or harm prospects for future growth in the overall economy.

The questions, which were also asked prior to the 2020 and 2016 presidential elections, focused on three economic policies—trade, immigration and taxing the wealthy to reduce income inequality. Consumers were asked questions about their perceptions of the economic consequences of the policies, with no reference to other possible factors voters might consider.

Shifting views on immigration

Views on immigration’s impact on the economy changed sharply after each of the past two presidential election years. In 2020, consumers viewed immigration more positively for the economy than in 2016, moving away from the immigration policies favored by Donald Trump, Hsu said.

Now, in 2024, opinions have shifted against immigration, with substantial drops in support for immigration across all sociodemographic groups. Republicans exhibited the strongest decline: In 2020, 47% reported that less immigration was better for the economy; in 2024, the share surged to 84%.

Even Democrats reported substantially more negative views on immigration this year relative to 2020, with a 48% minority viewing more immigration as better for the economy, compared with 62% four years ago. Still, their views are far more positive on immigration than Republicans, Hsu said.

“This year, some groups had relatively balanced views on the economic impact of immigration, meaning that they were not skewed in favor nor against immigration,” she said. “These groups included younger consumers, higher-income consumers and those with college degrees. With the exception of Democrats, all other groups reported net negative views of immigration.”

Views on higher taxes for wealthy remain steady

Consumers’ opinions on the implications of raising taxes on the wealthy are little changed from both 2020 and 2016. This year, a 47% plurality of consumers believe that raising taxes on the wealthy would benefit the economy, while 25% believe the economy would be harmed. Strong partisan gaps remain and are similar in magnitude to 2020.

“While Independents are, as usual, squarely between members of the two parties, they are less supportive of higher taxes on the wealthy than they were in 2020,” Hsu said.

In companies, innovative ideas often come out of teams. That’s why it’s so important to have team members who are excited and focused on projects that lead to innovation. However, having team members who are too passionate—especially to the point of obsession—can actually stifle innovation, according to new research from Hui Liao at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

“Innovation is not just about persistence or grit,” says Liao. “It’s also important for teams to be able to reconsider and adjust their approaches as needed. That’s where obsessive passion can become a barrier for team innovation—it prevents reflection and flexibility.”

Liao’s research—with four co-authors, published in the summer 2024 issue of Personnel Psychology—examined the dynamics of passion within more than 280 work teams. The researchers uncovered the contrasting effects of two types of passion, harmonious passion and obsessive passion, on the team’s ability to reflect, adapt and innovate.

“You’d think the more nonstop and engaged team members are when working on a project, the better,” says Liao. “But our research shows that teams benefit from pausing to reflect on their progress and reconsider their strategies from time to time.”

This process of reflection and discussion is what Liao and her co-authors call the team reflexivity. Reflexivity allows teams to take a step back, assess their goals, evaluate their strategies and consider alternative approaches. However, teams driven by obsessive passion may struggle with this.

“Obsessively passionate team members feel a compulsion to keep pushing forward, often at the expense of flexibility,” Liao notes. “The urge is so strong that they find it difficult to stop, which limits their ability to reflect.”

In contrast, harmonious passion is better suited for fostering team innovation, she says. With this type of passion, people are still excited about an idea, but they are in control and better able to balance it with other goals and activities.

“Team members with harmonious passion know when to engage and when to step back and rethink,” Liao explains. “This balance fosters a positive environment for team reflexivity and, ultimately, greater innovation.”

So, how can team leaders manage the mix of passion within their teams to foster innovation? Liao offers several strategies:

• Balance the passion within your team. Consider individual tendencies when forming teams. If some team members exhibit obsessive tendencies, balance them with others who have a more harmonious approach. Obsessive team members may bring important value—such as technical expertise or strong connections—but it’s important to ensure the team has members who are more flexible and open to new ideas to maintain adaptability.

• Address obsessive behaviors. Observe the team in action and point out obsessive behaviors when you see them. Sometimes people are unaware of their own tendencies. Once these behaviors are recognized, team members are more likely to make necessary adjustments.

• Encourage reflection. Team leaders should regularly organize team reflection activities. Create a safe environment where members feel free to share their opinions, disagree, or pose alternative ideas. Encouraging everyone to contribute ideas and actively listening to team members can significantly enhance a team’s ability to reflect and innovate.

Psychologists from Cardiff University have uncovered new insights into the role of celebrities and politicians in influencing public opinion on low-carbon lifestyles. The paper is published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.

“Behavior change is essential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions quickly. Flying less, eating less meat, driving electric cars, improving home energy efficiency, increased use of public transport and active travel are some of the most impactful changes we can make. However, these choices have proved elusive in the general population and are rarely encouraged or modeled by high-status individuals,” said Dr. Steve Westlake from Cardiff University School of Psychology, who led the research.

“We wanted to understand the effects of politicians and celebrities walking the talk on climate change and whether this could influence the public to adopt low-carbon behaviors.”

The researchers analyzed the opinions of 1,267 people from across the UK in April 2021, measuring peoples’ responses to leaders who advocate for taking action on climate change, while either leading by example, or not leading by example.

The Cardiff psychologists tested theories of credibility and embodied leadership to understand how the status of celebrities and politicians could encourage low-carbon lifestyles. They found that visible leading by example from politicians and celebrities significantly increases the willingness of members of the UK public to make these high-impact low-carbon choices.

Dr. Westlake said, “We found that leading by example improves public willingness to adopt low-carbon behaviors. Not only this, but leading by example greatly increases perceptions of leader credibility, trustworthiness, competence, and favorability. Leaders need to be credible to lead effectively, so this could be an important finding.

“We also found there is a strong appetite for leadership among the public—people really want to see leaders acting first. Our results indicate that embodied leadership by way of visible low-carbon behavior may provide a crucial ‘missing link’ in addressing the climate crisis, because it shows that leaders really are serious about it.

“The results indicate that if leaders are advocating for various forms of climate action including behavior change, they will be more effective if they ‘walk the talk’ by adopting a suite of low-carbon behaviors, and will have a negative effect on the motivation of the public if they do not.

“Our study demonstrates that celebrities and politicians who lead by example are doing much more than just reducing their own carbon footprint—they also encourage others to act and improve their credibility.”