All posts tagged: human

One man’s obsessive quest to weigh the human soul

One man’s obsessive quest to weigh the human soul

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Can you measure the weight of a human soul? No, but that didn’t stop Duncan MacDougall from trying. In the early 20th century, MacDougall put dying patients on a scale to try and prove the existence of a soul. One of MacDougall’s first test subjects was a tuberculosis patient. He was placed on the bed as he neared death. With doctors watching over, the man died, and MacDougall noticed the scale’s counterweight dropped with surprising quickness. The scales displayed the weight that had been lost upon death: ¾ of an ounce, or 21 grams. Had MacDougall solved a mystery that had plagued philosophers, theologians, and medical professionals for millennia? Not exactly. The “21 Grams Experiment,” as it’s come to be known, is the fascinating topic for our latest Popular Science video. While MacDougall’s experiment was deeply flawed, the idea behind it remains so appealing, more than a century later. We keep coming back to the 21 grams experiment because …

Sam Altman’s project World looks to scale its human verification empire. First stop: Tinder.

Sam Altman’s project World looks to scale its human verification empire. First stop: Tinder.

Published by skeptic

At a trendy venue near the San Francisco pier, Sam Altman’s verification project World celebrated its next evolution and rapid expansion of its ambitions.  And it’s starting with Tinder. Tools for Humanity, the company behind the World project, announced Friday plans to integrate its verification tech into dating apps, event and concert ticketing systems, business organizations, email, and other arenas of public life. “The world is getting close to very powerful AI, and this is doing a lot of wonderful things,” said Altman, speaking before a packed crowd at The Midway. “We are also heading to a world now where there’s going to be more stuff generated by AI than by humans,” he added. “I’m sure many of you where you’re like, ‘Am I interacting with an AI or a person, or how much of each, and how do I know?” World (formerly Worldcoin) distinguishes itself from many of its ID verification peers by offering the ability to verify that a real, living human is using a digital service while still protecting that person’s anonymity. …

Gazing Into Sam Altman’s Orb Now Proves You’re Human on Tinder

Gazing Into Sam Altman’s Orb Now Proves You’re Human on Tinder

Published by skeptic

Sam Altman’s iris-scanning, humanity-verifying World project announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday that Tinder users around the globe can now put a digital badge on their profiles signaling to potential suitors that they’re a real human, provided they’ve already stared into one of the startup’s glossy white Orbs and allowed their eyes to be scanned. The announcement follows a pilot project for Tinder verification that World previously conducted in Japan. The global Tinder expansion is one of the biggest tests yet for World, and the company’s bet that everyday consumers will be willing to sign up for biometric verification services to use internet applications. Founded in 2019 by Altman and Alex Blania, the World project was designed for a future where the internet is overrun with highly capable AI agents that make it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to tell who is really human. As companies like OpenAI—where Altman is CEO—and Anthropic push AI agents into the mainstream, the problem World was built to solve feels increasingly urgent. But World has struggled …

Sperm whale clicks contain vowel-like patterns similar to human speech

Sperm whale clicks contain vowel-like patterns similar to human speech

Published by Jenni Sidey

The sound is sharp, spare and strange, a burst of clicks cutting through seawater. For years, researchers treated those sperm whale signals mostly as timing patterns, measuring pauses and rhythms the way someone might study Morse code. But a new analysis suggests there is more going on inside those clicks than timing alone. Some of the animals’ codas, the short click sequences sperm whales use to communicate, appear to contain something like vowel structure. Not human language, and not proof that whales are “talking” in the way people do, but a communication system with features that look surprisingly close to human phonology. That is what makes the new work stand out. It does not claim to have decoded whale meaning. Instead, it points to structure, and a lot of it. Researchers working with Project CETI and the University of California, Berkeley analyzed thousands of sperm whale recordings and found that these codas fall into two distinct acoustic categories. The team describes them as a-vowels and i-vowels because they resemble broad differences seen in human vowel …

The Download: bad news for inner Neanderthals, and AI warfare’s human illusion

The Download: bad news for inner Neanderthals, and AI warfare’s human illusion

Published by skeptic

The real danger isn’t that machines will act without oversight; it’s that human overseers have no idea what the machines are actually “thinking.” Thankfully, science may offer a way forward. Read the full op-ed on the urgent need for new safeguards around AI warfare. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Despite blacklisting Anthropic, the White House wants its new modelTrump officials are negotiating access to Mythos. (Axios)+ Anthropic said it was too dangerous for a public release. (Bloomberg $)+ Finance ministers are alarmed about the security risks. (BBC)+ Anthropic just rolled out a model that’s less risky than Mythos. (CNBC)+ The Pentagon has pursued a culture war against the company. (MIT Technology Review) 2 Sam Altman’s side hustles have raised conflict-of-interest concernsHis opaque investments could influence decisions at OpenAI. (WSJ $)+ A jury will soon decide if OpenAI abandoned its founding mission. (Wired $)+ The company is making a big play for science. (MIT Technology Review) 3 A Starlink outage during drone tests exposed the …

Human rights groups raise alarm over fate of Salvadorans deported from U.S. : NPR

Human rights groups raise alarm over fate of Salvadorans deported from U.S. : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

For the past four years, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has extended a 30-day suspension of rights, effectively creating a police state that keeps Salvadoran deportees from the U.S. trapped in the Central American country’s notorious prisons. Illustration by Jackie Lay/NPR hide caption toggle caption Illustration by Jackie Lay/NPR T remembers the fear she felt when she was deported to her home country of El Salvador from the U.S. late last year. “It was traumatizing, I was so scared,” she told NPR in Spanish. T, who is back in immigration detention in the U.S. now, asked to be identified only by her first initial out of fear for her safety from Salvadoran officials. T fled her country nearly five years ago, because as a transgender woman, she says she was constantly harassed and threatened by men in her neighborhood. Now T says she felt harassed again by Salvadoran authorities at the airport who asked her to strip naked as they checked her for tattoos. “They told me that if my tattoos made reference to gang affiliation, …

The human eyes behind Artemis II’s most memorable photos

The human eyes behind Artemis II’s most memorable photos

Published by Jenni Sidey

In early April 2026, the Artemis II mission captivated me and millions of people watching from across the world. The crew’s courage, skill and infectious wonder served as tangible proof of human persistence and technological achievement, all against the mysterious backdrop of space. People back on Earth got to witness the mission through remarkable photos of space captured by astronauts. Images created and shared by astronauts underscore how photography builds a powerful, authentic connection that goes beyond what technology alone can capture. As a photographer and the director of the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, I am especially drawn to how these photographs have been at the center of the public’s collective experience of this mission. Astronaut Jeremy Hansen takes a picture through the camera shroud covering a window on the Orion spacecraft. (CREDIT: NASA) In an era when image authenticity is often questioned and with the capabilities of autonomous, AI-driven imaging, NASA’s choice to train astronauts in photography has placed meaning over convenience and prioritized their human perspectives and creativity. Capturing space from the crew’s perspective Photography …

Human Smuggler Extradited From Brazil To US: DOJ

Human Smuggler Extradited From Brazil To US: DOJ

Published by Jenni Sidey

Authored by Troy Myers via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), A Bangladeshi national, alleged by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to be a “prolific” alien smuggler, made his first appearance Monday in a Laredo, Texas, federal courtroom following his extradition from Brazil, according to a DOJ statement. Illegal immigrants who are believed to have crossed the border from Mexico into the United States are seen after the truck they were being transported in was interdicted by law enforcement officers in Laredo, Texas, on Sept. 13, 2022. Department of Justice/Handout via Reuters The indictment against Saiful Islam, 39, in the Southern District of Texas accuses him of being part of a conspiracy that smuggled numerous illegal immigrants through Central America to the United States, the DOJ said. “Islam participated in a wide-ranging human smuggling operation,” the agency said. The Bangladeshi man also allegedly helped other smugglers by facilitating the travel of aliens from São Paulo, Brazil, and other locations in South America, Central America, and Mexico, eventually instructing them in how to illegally cross the Rio …

Companies Just Learned a Brutal Lesson About Training AI to Do Human Jobs

Companies Just Learned a Brutal Lesson About Training AI to Do Human Jobs

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech A dismal job market has given rise to a grim new cottage industry: a buzzy San Francisco-based AI company called Mercor is hiring desperate job-seekers to train AI models to do the work they can’t get hired for anymore. The company has been recruiting educated and underemployed experts while keeping them fully in the dark about whose AI they’re even training. As New York Magazine reported last month, shifts are also crushingly long, the vast majority of managers are young and inexperienced, and contracts often end abruptly without any prior warning. Now, companies that hired Mercor — which include OpenAI and Anthropic, according to NYMag‘s reporting — have learned a rude lesson: Mercor revealed late last month that it had been hacked, again shedding light on Silicon Valley’s extremely fragile and contractor-dependent AI supply chain. The startup told TechCrunch that it was affected by an exploit linked to an open source project called LiteLLM. A sample of data …

AI Use Appears to Have a “Boiling Frog” Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns

AI Use Appears to Have a “Boiling Frog” Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech In a new study, researchers claim to provide the first causal evidence that leaning on AI to assist with “reasoning-intensive” cognitive labor — mental tasks ranging from writing to studying to coding to simply brainstorming new ideas — can rapidly impair users’ intellectual ability and willingness to persist despite difficulty. “We find that AI assistance improves immediate performance, but it comes at a heavy cognitive cost,” the study declares of its findings. “After just [about] 10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it.” The study, which was conducted by a multidisciplinary cohort of scientists from across the United States and United Kingdom, has yet to be peer-reviewed. But it builds on a growing body of research suggesting that extensive AI use can distort and dampen users’ thinking and independence, and as experts work to understand the impacts of widely-used chatbots on people as …