Science

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

From Nike and Google to Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, major brands are incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into their advertising campaigns. But how do consumers feel about robots generating emotionally charged marketing content? That’s the question a New York Institute of Technology professor raises in a new Journal of Business Research study.

Whereas predictive AI allows marketers to forecast consumer behavior, generative AI enables them to produce novel content, including text, images, videos, or audio. For example, a recent AI-generated Toys “R” Us commercial featured video content of the company’s founder as a boy alongside its brand mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe.

While many brands have trumpeted their AI-driven campaigns as a mark of innovation, others may fail to disclose AI use, leading to ethical concerns and calls for government regulation. However, even transparent brands receive backlash, as Google experienced when viewers were offended by its “Dear Sydney” ad, in which a father uses AI to help his daughter draft a fan letter to her favorite Olympic athlete.

“AI is a new territory for brand marketers, but what we do know is that consumers highly value authentic interactions with brands,” says the study’s lead author Colleen Kirk, D.P.S., professor of marketing and management at New York Institute of Technology. “Although more companies are now using AI-generated content to strengthen brand engagement and attachment, no study has explored how consumers view the authenticity of textual content that was created by a robot.”

Kirk and her study co-author, Julian Givi, Ph.D., a marketing researcher and faculty member at West Virginia University, completed various experiments to see how consumers react when emotional messages are written by AI. They hypothesized that consumers would view emotionally charged AI-generated content less favorably, impacting their perception of the brand and desire to interact with it.

In one scenario, participants imagined receiving a heartfelt message from a fitness salesperson who helped them buy a new set of weights. The message stated that he was inspired by the consumer’s purchase, with some participants believing that it was AI-generated and others believing that the salesman drafted it himself (control group). While the members of the control group responded favorably, those in the AI group felt that the note violated their moral principles (moral disgust).

As a result, they were also unlikely to recommend the store to others and more likely to switch brands when making future purchases. Many even gave the store poor ratings on a simulated reviews site.

Other scenarios also revealed key findings in support of the researchers’ hypothesis:

• AI-generated factual communications (vs. emotional communications) were less likely to elicit moral disgust, reduce positive word of mouth, and diminish brand loyalty among consumers.
• AI-generated messages in which the robot had self-autonomy (for example, an AI-generated memo signed by “The Summit Apparel AI Chatbot”) were viewed more favorably than AI-generated messages signed by a company representative.
• When participants believed that most emotional marketing communications were written by AI, they expressed disgust. The reverse was true when they believed most communications were written by a human. Therefore, brands may benefit from promoting the human origins of their products and communications.
• Messages simply edited, but not written, by AI were less penalized for authenticity.
• Human communicators (vs. AI) faced a greater “authenticity penalty” for copying emotional content.

In short, the findings suggest that companies must carefully consider whether and how to disclose AI-authored communications, always prioritizing authenticity in their interactions with consumers. As governments seek to increasingly regulate AI disclosure, making consumers more aware of how brands craft their messages, Kirk says marketers will want to pay close attention to the study’s findings.

“Consumers are becoming ever more skeptical of the human origin of marketing communications. Our research provides much-needed insight into how using AI to generate emotional content could negatively impact brands’ perceptions and, in turn, the consumer relationships that support their bottom lines,” she says. “While AI tools offer marketers a new frontier, these professionals should bear in mind a time-tested principle: authenticity is always best.”

Preparations are now under way for our annual festival of science and ideas, New Scientist Live, which takes place in London in just one week’s time.

The show opens on Saturday 12 October for two days packed with talks, hands-on activities and demonstrations, with something for everyone regardless of your age or interests. Explore the exhibition space, where some of our most popular interactive exhibits are back this year, including the hospital of the future – where you can try out surgical robots and virtual reality at the cutting edge of medicine – as well as the adrenaline-filled virtual rollercoaster ride. There are also brand-new experiences, involving ocean beasts, dinosaurs and more.

We have some amazing speakers joining us this year, including Alice Roberts, Turi King, Robin Dunbar and our own columnist David Robson. Across the four main stages – Mind and Body, Universe, Our Planet and Future – you can hear talks about everything from forensics and supermassive black holes to the secrets of gravity and how to eat for better brain health.

Our Engage Stage will also be bigger and better than ever. Here, you can spot some familiar New Scientist faces, including a live version of our Dead Planets Society podcast with hosts Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte, plus culture editor Alison Flood hosting a sci-fi showdown that will answer the important question of what the best science fiction novel of all time is.

I am excited to be hosting a stage on Monday, our dedicated schools’ day, where we open the doors to the next generation of scientists. The dedicated speaker line-up includes Suzie Imber and Dallas Campbell with live demonstrations, as well as Stefan Gates’s highly explosive show!

As usual, we will have an exclusive area and other perks for subscribers, but everyone is welcome – and if you can’t make it in person, you can also join via our live stream. I do hope to see you there.

In the complex network of human relationships, choosing to show allegiance to someone often shapes decisions and actions. But what happens when loyalty to one friend extends to their connections?

New research from the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business explores how the quality and strength of one’s loyalty to another can be influenced by the willingness to support an indirect tie, even when the outsider has been accused of unethical behavior. The paper, “When Your Friend is My Friend: How Loyalty Prompts Support for Indirect Ties in Moral Dilemmas,” was published in Organization Science.

Angus Hildreth, assistant professor at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, and Zachariah Berry, Ph.D. ’24, assistant professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, pursued the research because they were interested in understanding why certain people get away with wrongdoing over long periods of time.

“We were interested in why individuals like Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and even those with no power, can get away with unethical behavior and why no one steps forward to blow the whistle,” Hildreth said. “It seems intuitive that loyalty might explain why close friends wouldn’t come forward, but it’s less obvious why those who aren’t directly connected to perpetrators wouldn’t step forward.”

The researchers surmised it might be because loyalty—or, more specifically, the obligations of loyalty to direct ties, such as colleagues and friends—might transfer through a person’s network to other ties, and that this might explain why indirect ties don’t raise an alarm.

The researchers found that the obligations of loyalty to friends transfer to indirect ties even if they’ve been accused of wrongdoing such as sexual harassment, theft, false advertising, fraud, bribery, plagiarism and dishonesty. This transfer occurs regardless of the wrongdoing type, or the strength of evidence presented against the accused. This finding challenges the prevailing assumption that loyalty only benefits direct ties and suggests a more expansive influence of loyalty within social networks.

Their findings are based on 11 studies involving 2,249 participants conducted over five years. In several studies, participants were presented with a situation in which one of their colleagues’ friends, whom they did not know, had been accused of sexual harassment. Participants were asked about the likelihood that they would verbally support the accused.

“One of the fascinating things we found was that this loyalty effect remained no matter how much evidence was presented supporting the allegation,” Berry said. “We tried increasing the evidence from a second accusation to video-taped evidence of the alleged crime and still found that loyalty increased support.”

One of the critiques with the early studies was the hypothetical nature of the scenarios, so Hildreth and Berry conducted a separate field study involving a college fraternity in which they recruited a “confederate”—a member of the frat—to administer the study.

The confederate requested support from the other frat members for an anonymous friend who had supposedly been accused of stealing funds from an organization on campus. Each member of the fraternity was asked to add their name to a petition in support of the confederate’s friend. Unbeknownst to the frat members, they each received a different petition to ensure that they would be the second signatory on the petition (the confederate was first) if they chose to sign.

Hildreth said this was to reduce “social proof” concerns—the chance that members might sign only if they’d seen that several others had.

The researchers believe their work reveals important practical implications for preventing and managing unethical behavior in the workplace.

“Most organizations are aware that loyalty is this double-edged sword,” Berry said. “On the one hand organizational loyalty helps organizations attract, retain and motivate employees, but on the other hand, personal loyalties can get in the way of organizations making efficient and fair decisions.”

“Organizations probably aren’t aware that others’ loyal obligations may also bias decision-making,” Hildreth said. “For example, if you know your boss is a Cornell alumnus and one of the applicants your company is considering is also from Cornell, how does that factor into your decision-making, even if you have no connection to Cornell?”

The percentage of Jewish students on U.S. college campuses who said their Jewish identity was very important to them increased significantly from 2022 to 2024, according to a new study by a Tufts political scientist. An increasing number of students also reported that they felt a need to hide their Jewish identity to fit in on their campus and hide some of their opinions to fit in at Jewish activities on their campus, following a year of college-campus protests around the Israel-Hamas war.

Among other findings were that students of higher socioeconomic status, both Jewish and non-Jewish, were the strongest supporters of Israel, and that while many Jewish students saw their schools as aligned against Israel, many non-Jewish students saw school administrations as being pro-Israel.

The study was done by Eitan Hersh, professor of political science at Tufts University, for the Jim Joseph Foundation, which seeks to promote Jewish education in the U.S. The study began in 2022, using data from College Pulse, a survey research and analytics company that focuses on higher education. In 2022, only Jewish students were surveyed, but in subsequent years non-Jewish students on college campuses with significant Jewish populations were included.

Hersh thinks that similar studies for many different groups on college campuses could be useful. “It is really important to have independent research consistently on these questions, not just for the Jewish community, but for the Muslim community—for any community,” he says. “How are things going over time? How do we know if things are going well? How do we know if people are happy or unhappy?”

Hersh, who has done previous scholarly work on antisemitism, co-wrote the report with Dahlia Lyss, A24, who worked with him while an undergraduate at Tufts. Hersh spoke recently with Tufts Now about the report.

What are the main takeaways from the study?

One is that the students who are Jewish tend to feel connected to Israel—it’s an important part of their identity—and it’s not about the politics of Israel. Many of those Jewish students have the worst things to say about the Netanyahu government, but for religious, cultural, ethnic, and family reasons, many feel that Israel is important to who they are.

And the view that they have, which is that there needs to be a Jewish country, is basically really unpopular with some segments of the student population.

The other is that compared to 2022, there is a doubling of students saying that they hide their Jewish identity to fit in on their campus. A lot of the Jewish students we surveyed don’t necessarily like the conduct of the war, but they can’t give up this part of their identity so easily and they don’t intend to—and they don’t want to be socially ostracized. That’s because many students who are on the “Israel is evil” kind of side of the issue don’t see anything wrong with ostracizing students who have a different view than them. I think it’s important to document these trends.

One of the survey findings was about the profound difference between how Jewish and non-Jewish students viewed their schools. You write that many Jewish students see schools as overwhelmingly aligned against Israel, evidenced by the opinions of faculty, staff, and students, while many non-Jewish students tend to see their school administrations as overwhelmingly aligned with Israel.

This really came out in focus groups, and honestly, you can see both sides. They’re both right, in other words.

It’s clear that the students on both sides of this conflict felt aggrieved. There are students who say, “Look, I’ve been in protest movements my whole college career and before this one, the administration seemed to celebrate it and now they don’t.” From their perspective, that’s a real difference. And they attribute that to the administration having an oppositional view from them.

The Jewish students feel that a lot of students are against them. I think that they felt that the last few years particularly have been a time when universities have pressed students to be very sensitive to racial and gender identities, to make sure you’re sensitive about the language you use, so people aren’t offended. And that all of that went out the window when people were chanting “We hate Zionists” or “Let there be an intifada” [uprising against Israel] or things like this. I think the Jewish students felt, “Oh, the sensitivity for some reason stopped at us.”

The study shows that one of the strongest predictors of support for Israel among Jewish and non-Jewish students is higher socioeconomic status. Why do you think that is?

It’s interesting—it’s about the same effect among Jewish students and non-Jewish students, who are both about twice as likely to support the existence of Israel’s Jewish state if they’re from the higher-income families.

There are two competing theories about this. The one that I think is most likely is a social one, which is that there are certain communities like Indian Americans or Jewish Americans who, on average, have higher socioeconomic status and are clustered in some areas. If you’re in one of those kinds of communities, you’re likely to be friends with Jewish people, many of whom as kids grew up with more exposure to Jewish life, to synagogue life or summer camps, and have much more positive views toward Israel. You’re also likely to probably have met some Israelis before. If you know Jews and Israelis, you tend to be more sympathetic to Israel.

What’s the other theory?

It could be that lower-socioeconomic status folks have a different ideology, that they are more sympathetic to oppressed people, and they see the Palestinians as oppressed.

How do you get people to talk, to not villainize the other side, to see nuance?

Honestly, the classroom is a beautiful place for that. This ties into a course on conservatism that I’m teaching. The reason why my class can have deep, thoughtful discussions about trans rights or gun rights or affirmative action—really sensitive issues—is because it’s a place where they’re first of all trying to learn material. What do these authors who we are reading think? It’s an environment where you’re expected to articulate a position, even a position you don’t hold. That’s a very different environment than most people are in.

Ancient DNA analysis has revealed a detailed picture of the life of a toddler who died in southern Italy 17,000 years ago, possibly due to a congenital heart condition.

In 1998, researchers discovered the skeletal remains of a child carefully laid under rock slabs in the floor of the Grotta delle Mura cavern in Apulia, southern Italy. It was the only burial in the cave, which also included signs of daily life and human occupation, says Alessandra Modi at the University of Florence…

Remember that old high school chemistry experiment where salt crystals precipitate out of a saltwater solution—or maybe the one where rock candy crystals form from sugar water? It turns out that your understanding of how crystals formed in those solutions might be wrong.

A new theory demystifies the crystallization process and shows that the material that crystallizes is the dominant component within a solution—which is the solvent, not the solute. The theory could have implications for everything from drug development to understanding climate change.

The paper is published in the journal Matter.

“Crystals are ubiquitous—we use them in everything from technology to medicine—but our actual understanding of the crystallization process has been lacking,” says James Martin, professor of chemistry at North Carolina State University and author of a paper in Matter that outlines the theory.

“The prevailing ideas around dissolving and precipitating are that they’re essentially the reverse of each other, but they aren’t. In reality, they are completely different processes,” Martin says.

“Using the high school chemistry experiment with getting precipitate out of a solution as an example: when I dissolve salt (the solute) into water (the solvent), the water is dominant. It dissolves the salt by essentially ripping it apart,” Martin says. “If I then want to grow a salt crystal from that solution, the dominant phase must become the salt—which is the solvent at that point and is the one that forms the crystal.”

Thermodynamic phase diagrams, which describe concentration and temperature-dependent transition points in solutions, can be used to illustrate the new theory, dubbed the transition-zone theory.

The theory demonstrates that crystallization happens in two steps: first a melt-like pre-growth intermediate forms. Then that intermediate can organize into the crystal structure.

“To grow a crystal out of a solution, you have to quickly separate the solvent and solute,” Martin says. “When we refer to the ‘melt’ here, we’re talking about the pure phase of the solvent prior to crystal formation. The difference here is that my theory shows you get better, faster crystal growth by moving your solution toward conditions that emphasize the solvent; in other words, the solvent—not the impurity within it—controls the rate of crystal growth.”

Martin applied his theory to a number of different solutions, concentrations and temperature conditions and found that it accurately describes the rate and size of crystal formation.

“The main issue with previous descriptions of crystallization was the perception that crystals grow by having independent solute particles diffuse to, and then attach to a growing crystal interface,” Martin says. “Instead, it is necessary to understand cooperative ensembles of the solvent to describe crystal growth.”

According to Martin, the important aspect of the new theory is its focus on understanding how solute impurities disrupt that cooperative ensemble of solvent.

“By understanding the interplay of temperature and concentration, we can predict exactly how fast and large crystals will grow out of solution.”

Martin believes the phase diagrams could have important applications for not just crystal formation, but for preventing crystal formation, such as preventing kidney stones from growing.

“Crystals underpin technology—they’re all around us and impact our daily lives,” Martin says. “This theory gives researchers simple tools to understand the ‘magic’ of crystal growth and make better predictions. It’s an example of how foundational science lays the foundation for solving all kinds of real-world problems.”

To save power, NASA has switched off another scientific instrument on its long-running Voyager 2 spacecraft.

The space agency said Tuesday that Voyager 2’s plasma science instrument—designed to measure the flow of charged atoms—was powered down in late September so the spacecraft can keep exploring for as long as possible, expected into the 2030s.

NASA turned off a suite of instruments on Voyager 2 and its twin Voyager 1 after they explored the gas giant planets in the 1980s. Both are currently in interstellar space, or the space between stars. The plasma instrument on Voyager 1 stopped working long ago and was finally shut down in 2007.

Four remaining instruments on Voyager 2 will continue collecting information about magnetic fields and particles. Its goal is to study the swaths of space beyond the sun’s protective bubble.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune. It’s currently more than 12 billion miles (19.31 billion kilometers) from Earth. Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles (24.14 billion kilometers) from Earth.

© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Networks, which include nodes and connections, can help researchers model dynamic systems like the spread of disease or how the brain processes information.

Pairwise interactions between nodes can represent links between individuals—how two neurons connect with one another in the brain, for example—but scientists also study interactions involving three or more nodes. These higher-order interactions reveal changes and phenomena beyond those found by looking only at pairs.

Yuanzhao Zhang, an SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow, has studied how higher-order interactions affect a system at small scales. In new work published in Science Advances, he reports on how higher-order interactions can reshape a system at larger, even global scales. “We wanted to know how they change the entire landscape,” he says.

Zhang and his colleagues found that higher-order interactions can lead to deeper “basins of attraction,” which are collections of starting points that end up at the same state as the system moves forward in time. If the system were a pendulum, the lowest point is an attractor, and every possible starting point is in the basin of attraction because they all eventually converge there.

If the system were a brain working through a complicated math problem, then the thought processes that lead to a solution—hopefully the correct one—are in the basin of attraction. A deeper basin means that the solutions are more stable—that is, starting points get to the bottom faster or more quickly recover from small perturbations.

Surprisingly, though, Zhang and his group found that even though the basins get deeper, they become narrower. What starting points do end up in the basin get there faster, but overall, fewer starting points lead to the bottom.

“If we start from a random point in the landscape, somehow we never reach [the basins of attraction],” Zhang says. Higher-order interactions introduce a kind of nonlinearity that hasn’t been well-studied.

The group found this behavior by testing a specific class of networks, but Zhang hypothesizes that shrinking and deepening the basins is a more universal phenomenon among dynamic systems—and that higher-order interactions can lead to the formation of new basins.

“Once you introduce them, many new attractors that didn’t exist before would appear,” he says.

The new work may be useful in probing complex interactions in real-world systems. “We want those deeper but smaller basins,” Zhang says.

Smaller basins would allow a brain to easily jump between different states to complete a complex task. Deeper basins allow a friend in a conversation—or a person reading an SFI article online—to keep their train of thought if they get momentarily distracted.

“This stability allows the brain to recover faster from those small perturbations,” Zhang says.

Countries affected by severe climate change may also have a higher prevalence of violence against women, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

The research, published in PLOS Climate, examined how climate shocks—such as storms, landslides and floods—might be linked to higher rates of intimate partner violence in the two years following the event.

The researchers gathered data on intimate partner violence from 363 surveys conducted in 156 countries between 1993 and 2019, focusing on women who currently had a partner. Intimate partner violence was defined as any physical and/or sexual violence in the past year.

The team also gathered data on climate shocks from 1920 to 2022 in 190 countries. They then analyzed the relationship between climate shocks and intimate partner violence, while also considering the country’s economic status.

They found that there was a significant link between intimate partner violence and certain climate shocks (including storms, landslides and floods). Meanwhile, other types of climate shocks (such as earthquakes and wildfires) didn’t show a clear connection to intimate partner violence.

Countries with higher GDP had lower rates of intimate partner violence.

Lead author, Professor Jenevieve Mannell (UCL Institute for Global Health), said, “Existing evidence has found that when a woman experiences a climate-related event, she is more likely to experience violence in some countries and for some types of violence, but not others.

“We set out to explore what was happening at a national level to help inform international climate change policy.”

The researchers were unable to assess why different climate shocks have more of an impact on intimate partner violence. However, they believe that different shocks may take different amounts of time to have an effect on violence and this may not have been captured in the two-year window studied, due to data availability.

As a result, they are calling for more regular data collection by countries on measures of violence against women.

Professor Mannell added, “A small body of evidence shows that heat and humidity increases aggressive behaviors, including violence. Climate-related disasters increase stress and food insecurity in families in ways that can lead to increases in violence. They also reduce the social services often available for dealing with partner violence, such as police and civil society, who are more focused on the disaster.

“At the same time, governments may put in place shelters for disaster relief which are often overcrowded and unsafe, without thinking about the risks of sexual violence.

“All of this happens more often and with increased severity in countries that have patriarchal gender norms and where the use of violence against women is widely accepted as normal behavior.”

Importantly, the researchers believe that climate mitigation and adaptation efforts can and should play an important role in reducing violence against women.

This could include mentioning “violence against women” in Nationally Determined Contributions (the climate change commitments countries make) and allocating finances to address it, or developing Climate Change Gender Action Plans. Samoa and Fiji are two countries which have already done this.

The researchers also advise that violence against women needs to be a consideration in countries’ disaster planning processes.