Abstract Normally, the tissue that makes up each of your body’s organs only grows in the place it should. But that’s not the case for people with endometriosis. With this disease, tissue that lines the uterus grows outside the uterus as lesions. These cause pain and infertility. Endometriosis affects about 10% of women worldwide as well as some trans people. On very rare occasions it has been detected in men.  Scientists know that people with endometriosis have high levels of a type of white blood cell called macrophages. We wanted to find out how macrophages affected the growth of lesion ..read more

Abstract Have you watched cute cat videos or funny dog compilations? Or primates “monkeying around”? Then you know that mammals love to play. Even the dancing cockatiel has gone viral! But have you ever considered whether insects play “for fun”?  We did an experiment to test whether bumble bees take part in object play. We wanted to see whether they would interact and play with wooden balls. We found that the bumble bees did play with a ball-rolling action. Their behavior fulfilled our expectations of play in animals. What’s more, they also found it rewarding! We ruled out the possibility ..read more

Abstract How can you tell if you are talking to a computer? New computer programs called language models have gotten very good at mimicking people. It can be really hard to tell if you’re talking to a person or a computer. We wanted to know how people try to recognize computer-generated text and if they could do it accurately. We learned that people unconsciously use rules of thumb to figure out whether they are talking to a computer. These are often wrong, which means that people are vulnerable to scams. The post How can we tell whether we are talking to a computer or a person? appeared first ..read more

Abstract What do you think you will be doing 10 years from now? Do you have a job? Are you married? Do you have children? Throughout your life, there will be decisions to make that determine your path through life. This life trajectory is often affected by different factors. These factors are different from one country to another. They can include social status, religion, and government policies. Life trajectories can affect the success of a country. That is because they can determine how many people are part of the workforce. They also determine if the country’s population grows.  We ana ..read more

Abstract When was the last time you were at the zoo? You probably saw lots of animals doing lots of different things there. We wanted to know what zoo animals do when a solar eclipse happens. People have observed animals during solar eclipses before. But these were mostly just casual observations. We designed a study to observe 17 different types of animals at the zoo. First, we observed their normal behaviors. Then we recorded what happened during a solar eclipse. We saw that a lot of animals did something that wasn’t normal. Most of them started behaving like it was nighttime – in the middle ..read more

Abstract Have you ever noticed that people speak differently to babies and toddlers? Caregivers, particularly mothers, change their speech when talking to young children. How? Their speech includes higher pitches. They also use a wider pitch range and shorter sentences. Scientists call these changes in speech patterns child-directed communication, but you can think of it as baby talk. We wanted to find out if bottlenose dolphins also use child-directed communication. We analyzed the sounds made by female dolphins and found that they used higher frequency whistles when they were with their calv ..read more

Abstract Are you on social media? There are lots of fun things on social media, but there are also some bad things. Social media platforms try to manage hurtful content like hate speech. But there are other types of hurtful content that are harder to manage. One of these is fear speech. This is when people use words to create fear about a group. We wanted to know how common fear speech is on social media. So we created a model to identify fear speech and hate speech from 21 million social media posts. Then we examined things like how connected users were, how they interacted with people who di ..read more

Abstract Vaccines save millions of lives each year. Yet there are more and more people who are unsure about getting them. Why is that? So far, studies have looked at issues related directly to vaccines. But we think it might be something else. Could it have to do with how people’s minds work? To find out, we asked 356 people different questions about what and how they think, and what they believe.  What did we discover? People who like to trust their feelings and believe in supernatural things are more likely to be against vaccines. But those who think carefully and have some scientific k ..read more

Abstract Have you heard that women should make dinner for their family? Or that only men should work outside the home? Unfortunately, many people believe in these ideas about gender roles. It makes it hard to look at new situations without bias. For a long time, scientists have thought that in foraging societies, men are hunters and women are gatherers. We questioned these ideas. We investigated how often women take part in hunting, what they hunt, and how they hunt. We found that women do hunt intentionally in a lot of foraging societies. They sometimes hunt with different tools than men. We ..read more

Abstract Fake news is not new on the internet, and people often change images and videos for a joke. However, deepfakes aren’t only meant to make you laugh. Instead, they can spread misinformation or discredit a person or a group. As more deepfakes find their way onto the internet, we need to find the best way to detect these harmful videos. We tested whether the leading AI model or humans were better at detecting deepfakes online. We found that humans and the AI model were each good at identifying certain types of deepfakes. Maybe we could merge the abilities of both AI and humans to create t ..read more