This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Gearing up for happiness — … The news headline says it all: “Toyota has built an EV with a fake transmission, and we’ve driven it – Five minutes behind the wheel, and you’ll be a believer.” This is […]
The functional MRI Laboratory at the University of Michigan, US, is one of the few research centres to have their own fully non-functional MRI machine – which they call the “Mock Scanner”. The “fake” scanner is fitted with a set of loudspeakers which can faithfully replay the not-inconsiderable noise of a real, working, MRI machine. […]
Peace Prize winner Gordon Pennycook and colleagues did an experiment about how to disrupt the workings of genuinely faked news. They published a study about what they learned: “Timing Matters When Correcting Fake News,” Nadia M. Brashier, Gordon Pennycook, Adam J. Berinsky, and David G. Rand, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 118, […]
The height of dogged dishonesty or honesty, when dogs urinate, gets analyzed in this new study: “Urine Marking in Male Domestic Dogs: Honest or Dishonest?” B. McGuire [pictured here], B. Olsen, K.E. Bemis, and D. Orantes, Journal of Zoology, epub 2018. The authors, at Cornell University, explain: Via two studies, we tested the hypothesis that […]
