Thursday, March 28

Science

How your age, gender and nationality alter how you interpret emojis
Science

How your age, gender and nationality alter how you interpret emojis

Emojis are commonly used for digital communication, such as in text messages or on social mediaMix Tape/Shutterstock Think twice before you reply to a message with just an emoji – people’s interpretation of them can vary. Previous studies suggest that men and women differ in how they gauge facial expressions. Ruth Filik at the University of Nottingham, UK, and her colleagues wondered whether a person’s gender, as well as other factors, also affects their interpretation of emojis. To learn more, they enlisted 253 Chinese people and 270 British people aged between 18 and 84 years old, with a roughly equal split of men and women, to take part in an online survey. The researchers chose 24 emojis that represented one of six emotions: happy, disgusted, fearful, sad, su...
Why string theory has been unfairly maligned – and how to test it
Science

Why string theory has been unfairly maligned – and how to test it

WHEN Joseph Conlon was an undergraduate in the early 2000s, he avoided popular science accounts of string theory because he wanted to engage with it on a technical level, without preconceptions. It was a few years after the “second string theory revolution”, when theoretical physicists felt they might be about to crack open the deepest workings of reality, perhaps even deliver a theory of everything. As he explored the maths, Conlon was captivated. String theory famously suggests that everything is made up of one-dimensional strings (see “String theory: A primer”, below), and also predicts a huge array of possible universes – some 10500, for those taking notes. Whatever you think about that, it is fair to say that string theory hasn’t generated the testable prediction...
Preparing Students for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Sustainability
Science

Preparing Students for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Sustainability

Preparing Students for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Sustainability by Aminah Taariq-Sidibe |February 8, 2024 While green innovations and eco-friendly practices dominate headlines about sustainability, there is an equally vital yet often understated component to this rapidly evolving field: diversity. The sustainability industry, tasked with steering the world toward a more environmentally responsible future, finds its strength not only in technological breakthroughs but also in the diverse perspectives and talents that drive ingenuity and change. I sat down with John E. Williams, Columbia Climate School director of ...
This robot can figure out how to open almost any door on its own
Science

This robot can figure out how to open almost any door on its own

A wheeled robot set loose on a college campus has figured out how to open all kinds of doors and drawers while rolling around in the real world. The robot adapted to new challenges on its own – paving the way for machines capable of independently interacting with physical objects. “You want the robots to work autonomously… without relying on humans to keep giving examples at test time for every new kind of scenario that you’re in,” says Deepak Pathak at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pennsylvania. Pathak and his colleagues initially trained the robot through imitation learning, providing visual examples of how to open objects such as doors, cabinets, drawers and refrigerators. They then turned it loose on the CMU campus to try opening doors and cabinet...
Record broken for the coldest temperature reached by large molecules
Science

Record broken for the coldest temperature reached by large molecules

The vacuum chamber in which four-atom molecules were cooled to nearly absolute zeroMax Planck Institute of Quantum Optics Molecules containing four atoms are the largest yet to be cooled down to only a hundred billionths of a degree above absolute zero.  The techniques researchers use for cooling individual atoms, such as hitting them with lasers and magnetic forces, don’t work as well for molecules. This is especially true for molecules made of many atoms, because to be very cold they must be very still – the more moving parts a molecule has, the more opportunities it has to move and warm up.   “We have a joke that we study molecules not because it is easy, but because it is hard,” says Xin-Yu Luo at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany. He and his co...