Science

Tobacco plants have been engineered to contain creatine, a compound that is mainly stored in our muscles as a source of energy and is a popular exercise supplement. Researchers are now testing the approach in tomatoes.

Animal products are the only natural source of creatine, but it is also made artificially for supplements that claim to improve athletic performance and muscle mass. Pengxiang Fan and his colleagues at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, wanted to explore whether plants could be engineered to contain creatine, which would be particularly beneficial for vegans who don’t want to take such supplements.

The researchers first made DNA that codes for two enzymes that turn amino acids into creatine. They then inserted this DNA into Agrobacterium bacteria, which delivered it into the leaves of three tobacco plants (Nicotiana benthamiana).

After about three days, the leaves went from containing 0 micrograms of creatine to 2.3 micrograms of creatine per gram of leaf, on average.

The researchers repeated the experiment using DNA that codes for enzymes that make the molecule carnosine, another popular exercise supplement. A few days later, carnosine levels were 18.3 micrograms per gram of leaf, on average, compared with 0 micrograms at the start. The large variation in the final creatine versus carnosine levels was partly down to differences in the DNA that was used, says Fan.

But the creatine and carnosine only stayed at these levels for a few days because the DNA wasn’t inserted into the plant genomes, says Fan. The next step is to genetically alter the DNA of plants to produce the nutrients for longer periods, he says. His team is already engineering tomato plants to produce creatine and carnosine in the fruit as it ripens.

Fan expects to have made such tomatoes in about a year, but getting them onto supermarket shelves will probably take many years due to heavy regulation around genetically modified food, he says.

Fruit and vegetables that contain such nutrients would be much more convenient for some people than taking supplements, says Jose Antonio at Nova Southeastern University in Florida. Creatine and carnosine are also considered safe at high doses, so eating such produce probably wouldn’t be harmful, he says.

Political polls underestimated the support for Donald Trump and overstated the backing for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Four years later, the polling correctly anticipated Joe Biden’s win over Trump, but both national and statewide polls saw a much wider edge than he ultimately received

A task force report by the American Association of Public Opinion Research called the 2020 race the profession’s biggest misfire since 1980, when polls forecast a close race and instead Ronald Reagan beat incumbent Jimmy Carter by a landslide.

The Gazette spoke with John Anzalone, Biden’s chief pollster in 2020 and a Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics this fall, about what happened in the past two elections and how the field has tried to make adjustments amid shifts in the nation’s political dynamics.

A co-founder of The Wall Street Journal poll, Anzalone also worked for the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton (2016) and Barack Obama (2008 and 2012). His firm, Impact Research, has conducted polls for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, but he is not personally involved in that work. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What went wrong in the last two elections, and has the industry made any course corrections?

What’s really important is that we differentiate what professional pollsters who work for campaigns do, and what the public media polls do, because it’s very, very different. You’re not seeing campaign polls.

I’m not saying that there wasn’t error. There was, especially in ’16. But there are not many media polls that are spending a lot of money like we do to do daily interviews the right way, using multimodal methodologies, doing quotas, etc. We get branded by the fact that there are now dozens and dozens of cheap media polls that I think are a problem.

In 2016, there were a lot of legitimate concerns about polling error. What we found internally, in a group of pollsters, is that we weren’t getting the right proportion of non-college-educated voters. We were getting too many service-oriented, non-college-educated voters. We weren’t getting enough people who work with their hands or work in the factory or in agriculture, drivers, and things like that. We also saw that a lot of our small-town rural interviews were in the county seat, not in the rural areas. And so, we changed up a lot in terms of how we’re getting our interviews and quotas with non-college-educated voters.

You have to acknowledge that Trump so changed what’s going on in the political dynamics in America. And there was no way to model out who was coming out in 2016. There just wasn’t. We saw a little bit of that in 2020, as well.

I think the challenges have a lot to do with modeling who’s going to turn out. That has been an absolute mystery in the Trump era. I couldn’t tell you who’s going to turn out now.

What metrics do pollsters find best gauge who will turn out to vote?

We do an enthusiasm level, and we do a likelihood, but most of what we’re doing is message development and strategy. Most of what media polls do is the big number/little number, the head-to-head, the traits, the job ratings, etc. Pollsters who are in the political space to help campaigns are message development strategists. Everything that we do goes into a TV ad or a digital ad or a speech. Yes, the head-to-head is important, and we want to get that right, but media polls have turned every pollster into a prognosticator, and that’s a misread of what we do.

Many who were on the fence about voting when it was a Biden versus Trump matchup now say they plan to vote. How does polling capture this new, still-changing electorate?

All you can do is try to guess what percentage of your sample should be “new voters.” You have the voter history of 2022, 2020, 2018, and 2016, and you have new registrants. That’s not a perfect science. Who says that this cycle will be the same as past cycles, where you have to be up a certain percentage nationally to win the battleground states?

This is a tough industry on a good day. It has been a more difficult challenge during the Trump years figuring out how we can get hard-to-reach voters. Now we know there’s a universe that doesn’t want to take a live call or doesn’t trust a live call, so we’ve corrected for a lot of that. We’re constantly going to have to evolve, and we’re going to constantly have to correct and do better because of all of the challenges that we have.

But I’m proud of our industry, and I’m proud of the fact that, professionally, what we do—which you don’t see—we do really well. Polling is really expensive, and most media outlets don’t spend the money necessary to do it right.

What kinds of things might both the Trump and Harris campaigns want to know from their internal polling at this point in the race?

Presidential campaigns, whether you’re Democrat or Republican, are going to test both positive messaging based on the strength of issues and character traits, and they’re going to test all of the contrasts. There’s nothing each side hasn’t tested in terms of positive frames on each and negative frames on each. It’s September, they’ve been polling for eight months.

What every campaign does is they dial-test their convention speeches, and they dial-test their debates. [That is, monitor responses of sample audiences to get their immediate response to words, phrases, and ideas in real time.] So, they’re seeing what hits with swing voters. The convention speeches for both of them, you can guarantee they dial-tested, and that helped refine some of the things that they would say in the debate. And then, they’ll dial test the debates because they’ve got two months of rallies, two months of speeches, and they have TV ads, so the more data, the better. They have the foundation of their research on message, development, and contrast, and now, it’s all about refinement.

You say most media polls aren’t very reliable. Which are the better ones?

The Wall Street Journal is the gold standard, without a doubt, because it’s multimodal. I think that Pew Research Center is the gold standard of online polls because they’ve built their own online database. And then, I think the NBC poll is really good because you have a Democratic firm and a Republican firm running it, like The Wall Street Journal poll.

This story is published courtesy of the Harvard Gazette, Harvard University’s official newspaper. For additional university news, visit Harvard.edu.

Dolphins seem to make open-mouthed facial expressions most often while they are visible to a playmate, suggesting such displays may be similar to human smiles.

While we often perceive these as a smile, there has been little research on facial communication in dolphins.

To find out more, Elisabetta Palagi at the University of Pisa, Italy, and her colleagues analysed the behaviour of 22 captive bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) at two wildlife parks: Zoomarine Rome in Italy and Planète Sauvage in Port-Saint-Père, France.

In 80 hours of footage, the team observed a total of 1288 open-mouth expressions during social play sessions. More than 90 per cent of these events occurred during play between dolphins, with the rest happening during interactions between the dolphins and people.

The animals were more likely to assume the open-mouth expression when their face was within the playmate’s field of view — 89 per cent were displayed in this context. When the playmate saw the “smile”, they appeared to smile back 33 per cent of the time.

“Some might argue that dolphins mimic others’ open-mouth expressions by pure chance, given that they are often engaged in the same activity or context,” says Palagi. “But this doesn’t explain why the probability of imitating another dolphin’s open-mouth expression within 1 second is 13 times higher when the receiver actually sees the original expression.”

Some other animals, including monkeys, wolves and meerkats, make a “play face” with a relaxed open mouth, but there is debate about whether this is driven by emotions or a way to communicate intention.

“It is not easy to say if an open-mouth expression in dolphins conveys an emotional mood or is used to simply communicate to others, ‘Hey, don’t be scared, I am just playing!’, or both,” says Palagi.

She says the study can’t say conclusively whether it is comparable with smiling in humans. “We do not claim to clarify dolphin communication strategies during play with a single piece of research. However, we hope to open a new line of research in which the visual component is also taken into consideration.”

Luciana Moller at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, says open-mouthed behaviour in dolphins occurs in a range of contexts, including aggressive, sexual and social interactions. This means it is a very versatile signal, so can’t necessarily be interpreted as a smile.

She points out that making sounds might have been a factor in the dolphins opening their mouths, but the study didn’t look at any acoustic recordings.

Another drawback is that it looked at a small number of dolphin groups in captive settings, so their behaviour may not reflect that in the wild.

“Free-living dolphins have much larger spaces to interact and chase one another while playing, and many times are found in waters with reduced visibility,” says Moller. “In these circumstances, visual signals may not be as effective as acoustic signals.”

Why is it important to search for exoplanets in triple star systems and how many can we find there? This is what a recent study accepted by Astrophysics & Space Science hopes to address after a pair of researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington investigated the statistical likelihood of triple star systems hosting exoplanets. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the formation and evolution of triple star systems and whether they are suitable for hosting life as we know it.

The research is published on the arXiv preprint server.

Here, Universe Today discusses this incredible research with Dr. Manfred Cuntz, who is a physics professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and lead author of the study, regarding the motivation behind the study, the most significant results, the importance of studying triple star systems, and the likelihood of finding exolife in triple star systems.

What was the motivation behind the study?

Dr. Cuntz tells Universe Today, “Ages and metallicity (i.e., the amount of heavy elements = elements other than hydrogen and helium) are fundamental properties of stars, a statement that applies to all stars. Considering that most stars (excluding the sun) are members of higher order systems, the study of stars in triple stellar systems is a natural extension of research focusing on single stars.”

For the study, the researchers conducted a statistical analysis regarding both the ages and metallicities of triple star systems with a total of 27 confirmed exoplanets based on past research, with the number of exoplanets in each system ranging from 1 to 5. The ages of the triple star system, with margins of error, ranged between 20 million years old to 7.2 billion years old. For context, our sun is estimated to be slightly more than 4.6 billion years old.

The metallicities of the star systems, with margins of error, ranged between -0.59 and +0.56, which is often calculated based on the ratio of iron to hydrogen (Fe/H), and is also calculated with the equation X + Y + Z =1, with X being the fraction of hydrogen, Y being the fraction of helium, and Z being everything else (i.e., carbon, oxygen, silicon, iron, etc.).

These values range between -4.5 and +1.0, with stars exhibiting 0, -1, greater than 0, and less than 0, indicating a star is equal in iron abundance to our sun, one-tenth the iron abundance of our sun, greater metal content than our sun, and less metal content than our sun, respectively.

What were the most significant results from this study?

“Two highly significant results have been identified,” Dr. Cuntz tells Universe Today. “First, stars in triple stellar systems are on average notably younger than stars situated in the solar neighborhood. The most plausible explanation is a possible double selection effect due to the relatively high mass of planet-hosting stars of those systems (which spend less time on the main-sequence than low-mass stars) and that planets in triple stellar systems may be long-term orbitally unstable.

“The stellar metallicities of those stars are on average solar-like; however, owing to the limited amount of data, this result is not inconsistent with the previous finding that stars with planets tend to be metal-rich, as the deduced metallicity distribution is relatively broad.”

The distances to the respective triple star systems range between 4.3 and 1,870 light-years from Earth, but only 6 of the 27 triple star systems reside within 100 light-years away. These six triple star systems include Alpha Centauri (4.3 light-years), Epsilon Indi (11.9 light-years), LTT 1445 (22.4 light-years), Gliese 667 (23.6 light-years), 94 Ceti (73.6 light-years), and Psi1 Draconis (74.5 light-years), with the number of total exoplanets (with exoplanet candidates indicated in parentheses) within each system being 3 (2), 1, 1, 2 (1), 1, and 1, respectively.

For context, as of September 2024, the total number of confirmed exoplanetary systems within our cosmos is more than 4,300, which encompasses almost 5,800 exoplanets.

Despite the small number of triple star systems that host exoplanets, what is the importance of studying triple star systems?

Dr. Cuntz tells Universe Today, “Most stars (excluding the sun) are members of higher order systems, especially binaries—and in less common cases, triple stellar systems, and systems of even higher order.

“Therefore, the study of planets hosted by triple stellar systems is a natural extension of the standard approach focusing on planets around single stars. The current study focuses on some of the properties of stars in triple stellar systems, which are also known to host (a) planet(s)—a relatively rare setting. The importance of the current study is to expand our general understanding of star-planet systems.”

For Alpha Centauri, the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b, has been confirmed to be terrestrial (rocky), approximately the size of Earth in both radius and mass, and orbiting within the habitable zone (HZ) of Proxima Centauri, one of the stars that comprise the Alpha Centauri triple star system.

The only other terrestrial exoplanet orbiting within its star’s HZ is Gliese 667 Cc, whose mass and radius is larger than Earth, designating it as a super-Earth.

Given the small number of triple star systems that have exoplanets and even fewer that host terrestrial exoplanets orbiting in their HZ, what is the likelihood of finding exolife in triple star systems?

“The only planet where we know for sure that life does exist is Earth,” Dr. Cuntz tells Universe Today. “However, through both observational and theoretical studies during many decades of committed work, scientists are convinced that exolife is almost certainly real. This statement should also apply to planets in triple star systems.

“However, those planets are typically subject to relatively variable environmental forcings (e.g., variable amounts of radiation received by the stellar components), which is expected to reduce the likelihood of advanced life forms, but should still permit microbial life, especially extremophiles.”

As the number of confirmed exoplanets continues to grow, so should the confirmed number of triple star systems that host exoplanets. When science fiction fans read about multi-star systems, they almost immediately think of the iconic scene in “Star Wars: A New Hope,” in which Luke Skywalker watches two stars setting on the horizon.

While Tatooine was habitable for humans and other interesting life forms, this might not be the case in the real world, as demonstrated by Proxima Centauri b currently being the only Earth-like exoplanet orbiting in its HZ within 100 light-years from Earth.

Therefore, what constraints should scientists put on finding life in triple star systems? Should we instead study their moons, as the film “Avatar” depicted the semi-habitable moon Pandora orbiting a much larger exoplanet within the Alpha Centauri system? Are triple star systems with exoplanets as rare as the statistics show today?

“The search for life outside of planet Earth continues to be a fascinating topic,” Dr. Cuntz tells Universe Today. “Political and societal support for ongoing and future space missions is highly appreciated. We, as scientists, are grateful for the ongoing support by taxpayers around the world, but especially here in the U.S.”

Amazon has announced that it will end remote work for its office staff starting in January 2025. A decision that seems to go against the current, as the increasing pace of digitalization since the recent pandemic has marked a turning point for teleworking. Prior to the 2020 health crisis, this form of working was practically unimaginable for many companies but, since then, its presence has continued to grow in importance.

According to the Adecco Employment Opportunities and Satisfaction Monitor, produced by The Adecco Group Institute, telework in Spain increased by 19% in 2023, with more than 3 million people working remotely. This is more than double the number of employees doing so in 2019, i.e., before the COVID health crisis.

Working remotely is a concept that, no matter how much it grew with the pandemic and stabilized at a higher level afterwards, has not always generated a consensus. Sometimes companies have resisted implementing teleworking, which involves a number of challenges, such as the types of jobs for which it should be used, the use of technological resources, and communication between the different members of teams.

One hurdle is the management teams, whose job it is to establish whether teleworking is a good fit with the company’s operations; this strategic decision depends largely on them. A study by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) surveyed 186 people (most over the age of 45 and almost 45% of them women) from different European countries to establish the determining factors for managers in the implementation of teleworking in their companies.

The research, published in the journal Human Resources Management and Services, found that managers’ opinions of teleworking can make all the difference in its implementation in organizations. The study was carried out by Josep Lladós, Prof. Antoni Meseguer, Eva Rimbau and Mar Sabadell, members of teaching and research staff at the UOC’s Faculty of Economics and Business and of the Digital Business Research Group (DigiBiz). It indicates not only the key skills managers need in order to create a suitable context for teleworking, but also the aspects to be borne in mind to drive change.

The most important aspects for convincing managers

This research arose from the hypothesis that managers are the key to establishing and promoting teleworking in organizations. More specifically, it is essential that their perceptions of teleworking are positive and that they believe they have the necessary skills to lead teleworking teams.

According to the study, for managers, an inclination to adopt teleworking stems mainly from the perception that it will be useful for the organization and, at the same time, easy to implement. The first factor that affects their perception of the usefulness of teleworking is the impact they expect it to have on work performance.

“Managers can gauge the improvement in work performance with indicators such as the number of tasks carried out, the meeting of targets, the quality of the work delivered, absenteeism, etc. Although it’s difficult to objectively measure the impact of teleworking on efficiency and productivity, managers’ positive perception around how it affects their tasks impacts their perception of its usefulness,” said Eva Rimbau.

The skills needed to successfully lead remote work

As the study indicates, the implementation of teleworking in companies depends not only on managers’ views of their workers and the implications of usefulness or work performance, but also on their perception of themselves—that is, their own ability to take this type of work on board—and their relationship with employees.

“It’s essential that managers trust workers and manage their teams on the basis of outcomes or goals, not attendance or the number of hours worked,” explained Rimbau. The result is a “virtuous circle”: greater trust, greater potential for achieving positive outcomes and, in the case of workers, proactively taking on more duties to meet workloads.

The lack of face-to-face contact and coordination-related difficulties are some of the challenges faced by managers when implementing teleworking. This is why, as the research shows, managers’ confidence in their abilities to manage and supervise a group remotely is extremely important.

In addition, as Rimbau pointed out, to achieve this self-perception “managers must develop skills to build, motivate, recognize and hold teams accountable in a teleworking environment, using digital tools to communicate and interact effectively. They must avoid professional isolation, foster collaboration and trust, and adapt leadership and supervision to the digital context.” Workers need not just “bosses,” but leaders capable of fostering teamwork in any type of work situation.

The need for an appropriate context

Managers’ predisposition to implement teleworking is also affected by the surrounding influences, “such as pressure from peers and superiors and compatibility with the organizational culture,” Rimbau acknowledged. If a company’s senior management, or larger benchmark corporations in the industry, support teleworking, people in management roles will be more predisposed to adopt it.

Another key factor in adopting teleworking is the ability of managers to lead change, but, as the researcher pointed out, “the more digital and knowledge-based a company’s activities are, the easier it will be to adopt teleworking broadly and successfully.”

Technological barriers can have an impact on implementation, so it is essential that both workers and company possess the appropriate resources and that they digitize their processes and ways of working.

Many of us entered this so-called super-election year with a sense of foreboding. So far, not much has happened to allay those fears. Russia’s war on Ukraine is exacerbating a perception that democracy is threatened in Europe and beyond. In the US, Donald Trump, a presidential candidate with self-professed autocratic tendencies, has faced two assassination attempts. And more broadly, people seem to be losing faith in politics. “Most people from a diverse array of countries around the world lack confidence in the performance of their political institutions,” says a 2024 report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

On many objective measures, too, democracy isn’t functioning as it should. The systems we call democracies tend to favour the rich. Political violence is growing, as is legislative gridlock, and worldwide, elections are becoming less free and fair. Some 30 years after commentators crowed about the triumph of Western liberal democracy, their prediction seems further than ever from being realised. What happened?

According to Lex Paulson at the University Mohammed VI Polytechnic in Rabat, Morocco, we have lost sight of what democracy is. “We have made a terrible confusion between the system known as a republic – which relies on elections, parties and a permanent governing class – and the system known as a democracy, in which citizens directly participate in decisions and rotate power.” The good news, he says, is that we can revive the original dream of government by the people for the people. That is what he and other researchers are trying…

In an examination of thousands of human-written college admissions essays and those generated by AI, researchers found that the AI-generated essays are most similar to essays authored by students who are males, with higher socioeconomic status and higher levels of social privilege. The AI-generated writing is also less varied than that written by humans.

“We wanted to find out what these patterns that we see in human-written essays look like in a ChatGPT world,” said AJ Alvero, assistant research professor in the Department of Information Science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. “If there is the strong connection with human writing and identity, how does that compare in AI-written essays?”

Rene Kizilcec, associate professor of information science in Cornell Bowers CIS is a co-author of “Large Language Models, Social Demography, and Hegemony: Comparing Authorship in Human and Synthetic Text,” published Sept. 27 in the Journal of Big Data.

This research stemmed from Alvero’s dissertation work at Stanford University. Part of his research involved an analysis of approximately 800,000 college admission essays written from 2015–17 by prospective students in the University of California system.

“We consistently found that there was a strong connection between the profiles of the applicants—their test scores, their demographic information, even the high schools they were applying from—and their admissions essays,” Alvero said. “The relationship was so strong that we were consistently able to predict an applicant’s SAT score, within about 120 points.”

“The ways that we speak can encode and contain information about our past and who we are,” he said, “and it’s very similar in writing, at least with personal statements.”

For this work, Alvero and the team compared the writing style of more than 150,000 college admissions essays, submitted to both the University of California system and an engineering program at an elite East Coast private university, with a set of more than 25,000 essays generated with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 prompted to respond to the same essay questions as the human applicants.

For their analysis, the researchers used the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a program developed in the mid-1990s by University of Texas social psychologist James W. Pennebaker that counts the frequencies of writing features, such as punctuation and pronoun usage, and cross-references those counts with an external dictionary.

“One of the first big-data analyses of college admissions essays was done about a decade ago by Pennebaker,” Alvero said, “and we wanted to try to build a robust understanding of these patterns across institutions, across time, and we did that through using the same method that they used.”

Alvero, Kizilcec and the team found that while LLMs’ writing styles don’t represent any particular group in social comparison analyses, they do “sound,” in terms of word selection and usage, most like male students who came from more privileged locations and backgrounds.

For example, AI was found on average to use longer words (six or more letters) than human writers. Also, AI-generated writing tended to have less variety than essays written by humans, although it more closely resembled essays from private-school applicants than those from public-school students.

Additionally, humans and AI tend to write about affiliations (with groups, people, organizations and friends) at similar rates—despite the AI not actually having any affiliations. As LLMs like ChatGPT become more popular and more refined, they will be used in all sorts of settings—including college admissions.

“It’s likely that students are going to be using AI to help them craft these essays—probably not asking it to just write the whole thing, but rather asking it for help and feedback,” Kizilcec said. “But even then, the suggestions that these models will make may not be well aligned with the values, the sort of linguistic style, that would be an authentic expression of those students.

“It’s important to remember that if you use an AI to help you write an essay, it’s probably going to sound less like you and more like something quite generic,” he said. “And students need to know that for the people reading these essays, it won’t be too difficult for them to figure out who has used AI extensively. The key will be to use it to help students tell their own stories and to enhance what they want to convey, not to replace their own voice.”

Alvero and Anthony Lising Antonio, associate professor of education at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, are co-corresponding authors.

New research from Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research finds that nearly 50% of Harris County residents said they have been a victim of a crime or legal incident at some point in their lifetime, and one in three individuals in the county feel they were targeted due to their race, ethnicity, gender or other protected class. However, most of these individuals said they never reported these cases to the police.

The report was released today, offering for the first time a snapshot of Houstonians’ lifetime experiences with crime. Among the individuals reporting a crime or incident that they felt was motivated by bias or prejudice toward a protected class, 22% said they believed race was the motivating factor, 19% thought skin color was the reason, and 18% believed their sex or gender was why they were targeted.

Among nearly half of the population who were victims of crime or a related incident, they most commonly reported verbal abuse (30%), harassment or other intimidating behavior (30%) and property damage (24%).

While 73% of those who experienced a bias-motivated crime or incident reported it to someone, only 31% reported it to police, and 27% didn’t report the incident at all. The most frequently cited reason for not reporting a bias-motivated crime or incident to anyone was the belief that nothing would be done (66%). The second most common explanation from respondents was their lack of trust in the police (24%).

Daniel Potter, director of the Kinder Institute’s Houston Population Research Center and the report’s lead researcher, said the findings have important implications when it comes to supporting victims of crime in Houston and Harris County. (The Houston Police Department and Harris County have information online instructing what to do if you think you have been the victim of a hate crime.)

“Crime has been a persistent concern in Harris County, especially those motivated by race, skin color and sex or gender,” Potter said. “Many of the individuals we surveyed are sharing the incident details with friends and family, but friends and family may not have the resources or training to help them properly respond.”

In the survey, “crimes” were defined as threats with the intention to cause pain, injury or damage; physical assault; or damage to property. “Incidents” were defined as harassment or abusive, annoying or intimidating behavior; verbal abuse; or online abuse or cyberbullying. The survey did not ask when the crime or incident occurred. The findings were collected in summer 2023 as part of a larger survey from the Greater Houston Community Panel.

Potter noted that underreporting of crime is a national concern. In 2022, 32% of property crime and 42% of violent crime were reported to police, suggesting that the majority of criminal acts are never reported, according to surveys conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice. When it comes to hate crimes, federal estimates suggest only 1 in 31 incidents are actually reported to authorities.

Between 2018 and 2023, the Houston Police Department reported an average of about 39 hate crimes per year in its 2023 Annual Hate Crime Report. According to data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, from 2019 to 2022 the Harris County Sheriff’s Office reported an average of about 15 hate crimes each year. And last year, The Texas Tribune found that 82% of law enforcement agencies in the state reported not a single hate crime that year—a fact attributed to underreporting, lack of awareness and other factors.

Giving AI chatbots human feedback on their responses seems to make them better at giving convincing, but wrong, answers.

The raw output of large language models (LLMs), which power chatbots like ChatGPT, often contains biased, harmful or irrelevant information, and their style of interaction can seem unnatural to humans. To get around this, developers often get people to evaluate a model’s responses and then fine-tune it based on this feedback.

Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl With The Pearl Earring” is one of the world’s most popular paintings—and now scientists believe they know why, by measuring how the brain reacts when the work is viewed.

The Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, which houses the 17th century masterpiece, commissioned neuroscientists to measure brain output when viewing the portrait and other well-known works.

They discovered that the viewer is held captive by a special neurological phenomenon they called “Sustained Attentional Loop”, which they believe is unique to the “Girl With The Pearl Earring”.

The viewer’s eye is automatically drawn first to the girl’s own eye, then down to her mouth, then across to the pearl, then back to the eye—and so it continues.

This makes you look at the painting longer than others, explained Martin de Munnik, from research company Neurensics that carried out the study.

“You have to pay attention whether you want to or not. You have to love her whether you want to or not,” he said.

By measuring brainwaves, the scientists also discovered the precuneus, the part of the brain governing consciousness and personal identity, was the most stimulated.

“It was predictable that the Girl was special. But the ‘why’ was also a surprise to us,” said De Munnik.

He said it was the first known study to use EEG and MRI brain scanning machines to measure the neurological response to artwork.

“The longer you look at somebody, the more beautiful or more attractive somebody becomes,” he noted, which also explains the popularity of the Dutch master’s subject.

“Why are you familiar with this painting and not with the other paintings? Because of this special thing she has.”

‘The brain doesn’t lie’

The scientists also compared the neurological response when looking at the genuine painting in the museum versus being confronted with a reproduction.

They found the emotional reaction experienced by the viewer was ten times stronger for an original than a poster.

To carry out the tests, scientists attached an eye tracker and cap to track brainwaves on 10 subjects that were shown the real paintings but also reproductions.

It shows the importance of seeing original art, said Mauritshuis Director Martine Gosselink.

“It’s so important to engage with art, whether it’s photography, or dance, or old masters from the 17th century,” the director, 55, told AFP in an interview.

“It is important, and it really helps to develop your brain… The brain doesn’t lie,” she added.

Vermeer often drew the focus onto one spot in his works, with the surrounding details more blurred, she explained.

However, the “Girl With The Pearl Earring” has three such focal points—the eye, mouth, and pearl—and Gosselink said this set the work apart from other Vermeer paintings.

“Here we see somebody really looking at you, whereas all other paintings by Vermeer, you see someone writing or doing some needlework, or a person busy doing something,” she said.

“But that’s the big difference with this girl. She’s watching you.”

De Munnik, 65, said it would be interesting to carry out similar studies on other famous paintings, such as Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa for example.

Mauritshaus director Gosselink alluded to a friendly rivalry between the two great works.

“People sometimes call (The Girl With The Pearl Earring) the Mona Lisa of the North, but I think times are changing, so maybe the Mona Lisa is the Girl of the South,” she joked.

© 2024 AFP