All posts tagged: Experiments

Psychology textbooks still misrepresent famous experiments and controversial debates

Psychology textbooks still misrepresent famous experiments and controversial debates

A recent study published in The Journal of General Psychology suggests that many introductory psychology textbooks continue to misrepresent scientific findings and repeat long-standing myths. While there have been modest improvements over the past few years, the research provides evidence that textbooks still struggle to accurately present controversial topics and historical events. This ongoing issue means that college students may be learning an oversimplified or biased version of psychological science. In recent years, scientists have noticed a troubling trend in how psychology is taught to college freshmen. Many textbooks repeat scientific urban legends, which are famous but factually incorrect stories used to illustrate scientific concepts. Textbooks also tend to exaggerate the level of agreement among scientists on controversial issues, often leaning toward politically progressive viewpoints. Researchers Jeffrey M. Brown of Texas A&M International University and Christopher J. Ferguson of Stetson University wanted to track whether these known problems were being fixed. They sought to evaluate if publishers had updated their materials to reflect the most accurate scientific evidence. “I was chatting with my co-author, and …

Breakthrough ion clock experiments reveal that time can go quantum

Breakthrough ion clock experiments reveal that time can go quantum

Time already behaves strangely in modern physics. It can stretch, slow, and split depending on speed and gravity. Now a new theoretical study pushes that weirdness into even stranger territory. It argues that time itself may carry quantum signatures that could soon be tested with some of the most precise clocks ever built. That idea sounds almost like science fiction. In everyday life, a clock ticks one second at a time, in one direction, at one rate. In relativity, that neat picture breaks down because motion changes how quickly time passes. A moving clock runs differently from one at rest, even if the difference is tiny. But quantum physics adds another twist, because motion itself can exist in superposition. With this, a particle can effectively occupy more than one state at once. Put those two ideas together and the result is startling. A clock whose motion follows quantum rules may not experience one clean flow of time. In principle, it could evolve along different time paths at once, ticking both faster and slower in a …

A California forest synagogue experiments with nature-based spirituality

A California forest synagogue experiments with nature-based spirituality

OCCIDENTAL, Calif. (RNS) — On an unseasonably warm Friday evening in March, 40 people gathered for a Kabbalat Shabbat service in a grove of redwoods and California live oaks, about an hour and a half drive north of San Francisco. A group of musicians led the Jewish congregation in singing Hebrew psalms as an owl made its presence known from somewhere above. For the silent Amidah prayer, the rabbi invited the congregants — dressed in jeans, hats and hiking shoes — to venture further into the forest for several minutes of private reflection. “With your eyes, with your heart, please take a moment to greet the trees,” the rabbi said. “Shalom.” Later, the group sat on picnic tables and shared a vegetarian potluck meal in semidarkness. The service was part of Makom Shalom, a forest synagogue that launched during the High Holidays last year and has grown to 83 adult members. Rabbi Zelig Golden, a former environmental lawyer and nonprofit director, leads the nondenominational congregation in rural West Sonoma County. It’s a new iteration of …

Inertia moves to commercialize one of the world’s most elaborate science experiments

Inertia moves to commercialize one of the world’s most elaborate science experiments

Fusion power startup Inertia Enterprises said on Tuesday that it has signed three agreements with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to help bring the laser-based fusion reactor pioneered at the Californian lab to market. The deals could give Inertia a boost over rival startups. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at LLNL is so far the only experiment to prove that controlled fusion reactions could produce more power than they require to ignite. Inertia burst onto the scene in February with a $450 million Series A, making it one of the best capitalized startups in the industry. Inertia and LLNL are working on a type of fusion called inertial confinement, which generates fusion conditions by compressing a fuel pellet using some external force, unlike other approaches that use powerful magnetic fields to confine plasmas until atoms fuse. At the NIF, 192 laser beams are fired into a large vacuum chamber so that they converge on a small gold cylinder called a hohlraum, which contains a diamond-coated fuel pellet. When the lasers hit the hohlraum, it …

Human Uterus Kept Functioning Outside the Body for Experiments

Human Uterus Kept Functioning Outside the Body for Experiments

This republished article first appeared in the National Review. Brave new world alert! Scientists used a machine deployed in organ transplant medicine to keep a surgically removed human uterus alive for one day, furthering the goal of being able to use donated uteri experimentally over long periods of time, including for gestation. From the MIT Technology story: The team members want to keep donated human uteruses alive long enough to see a full menstrual cycle. They hope this will help them study diseases of the uterus and learn more about how embryos burrow their way into the organ’s lining at the start of a pregnancy. They also hope that future iterations of their device might one day sustain the full gestation of a human fetus. The machine is technically called PUPER, which stands for “preservation of the uterus in perfusion.” But González’s colleague Xavier Santamaria says the team has adopted a nickname for it: “We call it ‘Mother.’” Well, that’s reductionist and instrumentalizing. Gestating a baby involves far more of the mother’s body and self than a functioning …

Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram’s obedience experiments

Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram’s obedience experiments

Reassessing one of the most famous psychological experiments in history, a recent analysis of audio recordings reveals that subjects who seemingly obeyed orders to administer severe electric shocks actually broke the rules of the scientific study most of the time. The authors suggest that this routine violation of experimental procedures transformed the laboratory into a scene of unauthorized violence, altering our understanding of compliance and coercion. The research was published in the journal Political Psychology. In the early 1960s, American social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments to understand how ordinary people could be directed to commit violent acts. Volunteers were recruited for what they were told was a study on memory and learning at Yale University. Upon arriving, they were assigned the role of a teacher and introduced to a learner, who was actually an actor working for the researchers. The teacher was instructed to read a list of word pairs to the learner and test their memory. For every incorrect answer, the teacher had to administer an electric shock, increasing the …

What 122 Universal Basic Income Experiments Actually Show

What 122 Universal Basic Income Experiments Actually Show

Authroed by Vance Ginn via the Daily Economy, Artificial intelligence has become the latest excuse for reviving one of the oldest bad ideas in economic policy: a universal basic income. Recent pieces in Newsweek, the LSE Business Review, and Fortune have all helped push the idea that AI may soon wipe out so many jobs that Washington will need to send everyone a check. Image Credit: Shutterstock That makes for a catchy headline. It also makes for terrible economics. The right question is not whether AI will disrupt work. Of course it will. The right question is this: after more than 100 local guaranteed-income experiments, what have we actually learned? The answer is much less flattering to UBI than its promoters would like. What 122 UBI-Style Pilots Show A new AEI working paper by Kevin Corinth and Hannah Mayhew gives the best recent overview of the evidence. Per their study, there were 122 guaranteed basic income pilots across 33 states and the District of Columbia between 2017 and 2025. Those pilots allocated about $481.4 million …

A Grim Truth Is Emerging in Employers’ AI Experiments

A Grim Truth Is Emerging in Employers’ AI Experiments

The tremendous hype surrounding AI coding shows no signs of dying down. Last month, Anthropic released a suite of industry-specific plug-ins for its Claude Cowork AI agent, panicking investors over fears that traditional enterprise software-as-a-service companies could soon be made obsolete. The announcement triggered a trillion-dollar sell-off, with many tech companies seeing sharp declines in their share prices. It even seemed to jolt Sam Altman’s OpenAI, which moved to drop many of its distracting “side quests” in a concerted effort to double down on coding and enterprise-specific AI tools. Yet plenty of glaring questions about the long-term viability of AI programming prevail, with some warning that questionable and unverified code could come to spell disaster for corporations that eagerly embrace it. Indeed, contrary to the hype, researchers have consistently found that AI-generated code is a bug-filled mess, forcing some programmers to pick up the pieces. “No one knows right now what the right reference architectures or use cases are for their institution,” Dorian Smiley, CTO and founder of AI software engineering company Codestrap, told The …

Andrej Karpathy’s new open source ‘autoresearch’ lets you run hundreds of AI experiments a night — with revolutionary implications

Andrej Karpathy’s new open source ‘autoresearch’ lets you run hundreds of AI experiments a night — with revolutionary implications

Over the weekend, Andrej Karpathy—the influential former Tesla AI lead and co-founder and former member of OpenAI who coined the term “vibe coding”— posted on X about his new open source project, autoresearch. It wasn’t a finished model or a massive corporate product: it was by his own admission a simple, 630-line script made available on Github under a permissive, enterprise-friendly MIT License. But the ambition was massive: automating the scientific method with AI agents while us humans sleep. “The goal is to engineer your agents to make the fastest research progress indefinitely and without any of your own involvement,” he stated on X. The system functions as an autonomous optimization loop. An AI agent is given a training script and a fixed compute budget (typically 5 minutes on a GPU). It reads its own source code, forms a hypothesis for improvement (such as changing a learning rate or an architecture depth), modifies the code, runs the experiment, and evaluates the results. If the validation loss—measured in bits per byte (val_bpb)—improves, it keeps the change; …

The UK government is backing AI that can run its own lab experiments

The UK government is backing AI that can run its own lab experiments

“There are better uses for a PhD student than waiting around in a lab until 3 a.m. to make sure an experiment is run to the end,” says Ant Rowstron, ARIA’s chief technology officer.  ARIA picked 12 projects to fund from the 245 proposals, doubling the amount of funding it had intended to allocate because of the large number and high quality of submissions. Half the teams are from the UK; the rest are from the US and Europe. Some of the teams are from universities, some from industry. Each will get around £500,000 (around $675,000) to cover nine months’ work. At the end of that time, they should be able to demonstrate that their AI scientist was able to come up with novel findings. Winning teams include Lila Sciences, a US company that is building what it calls an AI nano-scientist—a system that will design and run experiments to discover the best ways to compose and process quantum dots, which are nanometer-scale semiconductor particles used in medical imaging, solar panels, and QLED TVs. “We …