Weird World News

January 25, 2025

Top Headlines

Why Are Most Companies Failing to Benefit from AI? It's About the People Not the Tech

Jan. 22, 2025 — Successful uptake of new technology is a matter of emotions -- and with 4 in 5 companies saying they're failing to capitalize on its potential, managers need to know how to deal with them, say ...

Imagining the Physics of George R.R. Martin's Fictional Universe

Jan. 23, 2025 — Researchers have derived a formula for viral behavior in the Wild Cards, a science fiction series written by a collection of authors about an alien virus called the Wild Card that mutates human DNA. The formula he derived is a Lagrangian ...

Building Sentence Structure May Be Language-Specific

Jan. 21, 2025 — Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study, scientists recorded the brain activity of participants listening to Dutch stories. In contrast to English, sentence processing in Dutch was based ...

Ancient Genomes Reveal an Iron Age Society Centred on Women

Jan. 15, 2025 — A groundbreaking study finds evidence that land was inherited through the female line in Iron Age Britain, with husbands moving to live with their wife's community. This is believed to be the first time such a system has been documented in European ...

Latest Headlines

updated 11:30pm EST

Atop the Oregon Cascades, Team Finds a Huge Buried Aquifer

Jan. 13, 2025 — Scientists have mapped the amount of water stored beneath volcanic rocks at the crest of the central Oregon Cascades and found an aquifer many times larger than previously estimated -- at least 81 ...

Rethinking Population Management in Zoos

Jan. 8, 2025 — Until now, contraception has been the method of choice for zoos to avoid surplus animals. Researchers are now calling for a paradigm shift: zoos could preserve their breeding populations, raise ...

Lost Score Revives Sound of Music and Voices from Centuries Past

Dec. 18, 2024 — A fragment of 'lost' music found in the pages of Scotland's first full-length printed book is providing clues to what music sounded like five centuries ago. Scholars have been investigating the ...

World Cup Soccer Is Getting Faster for Men and Women Alike

Dec. 17, 2024 — If the experience of watching a FIFA World Cup soccer final is intense, spare a thought for the players, who are competing at an ever increasing intensity, according to a new ...

Smarter City Planning: Researchers Use Brain Activity to Predict Visits to Urban Areas

Nov. 21, 2024 — Researchers have measured the brain activity of people who had never been to a specific city and then use this brain activity to predict other ...

Northerners, Scots and Irish Excel at Detecting Fake Accents to Guard Against Outsiders, Study Suggests

Nov. 20, 2024 — People from Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin and the north-east of England are better at detecting someone imitating their accent than people from London and ...

Gaming for the Good!

Nov. 18, 2024 — It turns out gaming is good for you! New research indicates massive multiplayer online gamers learn by gaming and their skills in the workplace are enriched by those seemingly endless hours ...

Anti-Fatberg Invention Could Help Unclog City Sewers

Nov. 13, 2024 — Engineers have invented a protective coating for concrete pipes that could help drastically reduce the formation of fatbergs in ...

Chimpanzees Perform Better on Challenging Computer Tasks When They Have an Audience

Nov. 8, 2024 — When people have an audience watching them, it can change their performance for better or worse. Now, researchers have found that chimpanzees' ...

Scientists Unveil Strategies to Make Self-Driven Vehicles Passenger-Friendly

Nov. 6, 2024 — Automated vehicles promise to improve urban mobility, but passenger trust remains a challenge. Providing timely, passenger-specific explanations for ...

Judging Knots Throws People for a Loop

Dec. 9, 2024 — We tie our shoes, we put on neckties, we wrestle with power cords. Yet despite deep familiarity with knots, most people cannot tell a weak knot from a strong one by looking at them, research ...

Giving a Gift? Better Late Than Never, Study Finds

Dec. 9, 2024 — If you feel terrible about giving a late gift to a friend for Christmas or their birthday, this study has good news for you. Researchers found that recipients aren't nearly as upset about ...

Political Opinions Influence Our Choice of Chocolate

Nov. 25, 2024 — We distance ourselves from completely neutral products if they are liked by people who have political views that we find disagreeable. Even chocolate can be political, according to new research from ...

Texting Abbreviations Makes Senders Seem Insincere, Study Finds

Nov. 14, 2024 — If you want to seem sincere and receive more responses to your texts, spell out words instead of abbreviating them, according to new ...

Explaining Science Through Dance

Nov. 5, 2024 — Explaining a theoretical science concept to high school students requires a new way of thinking altogether, which is precisely what researchers did when they orchestrated a dance with high school ...

The Secrets of Baseball's Magic Mud

Nov. 4, 2024 — The unique properties of baseball's famed 'magic' mud, which MLB equipment managers applied to every ball in the World Series, have never been scientifically quantified -- until now. ...

Into the Great Wide Open: How Steppe Pastoralist Groups Formed and Transformed Over Time

Oct. 30, 2024 — With the 'time-traveling ability' of archaeogenetic studies it has become possible to shed light onto the dynamic past of human populations world-wide. Integrated with archaeological and ...

Keeping Fewer Friends Protects Aging Monkeys from Diseases

Oct. 28, 2024 — Becoming less sociable protects older monkeys from getting ill, new research ...

Move Along, Moose: Study Reveals the 'Most Canadian' Animals

Oct. 25, 2024 — What is the 'most Canadian' animal? Spoiler: it's not the beaver, or the moose. A new study ranks species of terrestrial vertebrates in Canada by their level of Canadian evolutionary ...

AI-Generated News Is Harder to Understand, Study Finds

Oct. 24, 2024 — Readers find automated news articles poorer than manually-written texts in relation to word choice and use of ...

People Hate Stories They Think Were Written by AI: Even If They Were Written by People

Oct. 21, 2024 — AI-written stories are getting better, but people still distrust AI-generated ...

People Sympathize With Bullied AI Bots

Oct. 17, 2024 — In a new study, humans displayed sympathy towards and protected AI bots who were excluded from ...

Toddlers Show Increased Physical Activity With a Robot Playmate Moving Around the Room

Oct. 9, 2024 — Parents seeking help in encouraging toddlers to be physically active may soon need to look no further than an inexpensive robotic buddy for their kids, a new study ...

Are Auditory Magic Tricks Possible for a Blind Audience?

Oct. 4, 2024 — Magic tricks make the impossible seem possible. Magicians have long captivated audiences with visual tricks, such as pulling a bunny from a hat or sawing someone in half, but tricks that rely on ...

AI Simulation Gives People a Glimpse of Their Potential Future Self

Oct. 2, 2024 — 'Future You' is a generative AI tool that enables users to have a simulated conversation with a potential version of their future selves. The chatbot is meant to reduce users' anxiety, ...

Multilingual Gossip in Elizabethan London

Sep. 24, 2024 — Stranger churches in early modern London had 'eyes everywhere' to hear, spread and dispel gossip in multiple languages, according to new ...

'Out-of-Body' Research Could Lead to New Ways to Promote Social Harmony

Sep. 9, 2024 — Out-of-body experiences, such as near-death experiences, can have a 'transformative' effect on people's ability to experience empathy and connect with others, new research ...

How to Catch a Criminal Using Their 'Skin Shedder' Profile

Aug. 22, 2024 — A pioneering new DNA forensics technique is looking for a reliable method to measure a suspect's individual level of natural shedding of skin and other cells to add to, and compare with, ...

Study Explains Why Laws Are Written in an Incomprehensible Style

Aug. 19, 2024 — A new study on 'legalese' suggests this convoluted language acts to convey a sense of authority in legal documents. The researchers also found that even non-lawyers use legalese when asked ...

How 'Winner and Loser Effects' Impact Social Rank in Animals -- And Humans

Aug. 19, 2024 — A new article provides a narrative review of the relevant similarities and distinctions between nonhumans and humans to assess the causes and consequences of winner and loser effects in ...