The Intersection of Psychology and Political Choices

Number of words: 3,601 What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany’s best psychologists, and we long ago … Read more

Empowering Communities with Affordable Solar Water Solutions

Number of words: 652 Tank like devices called solar stills use the sun to evaporate dirty or salty water and condense the vapor into safe drinking water. But large, expensive stills can only produce enough water for a small family. Now, researchers have developed a new material that speeds the process of evaporation, enabling a … Read more

The Hidden Environmental Costs of AI Development

Number of words: 876 The artificial-intelligence industry is often compared to the oil industry: once mined and refined, data, like oil, can be a highly lucrative commodity. Now it seems the metaphor may extend even further. Like its fossil-fuel counterpart, the process of deep learning has an outsize environmental impact. In a new paper, researchers … Read more

The Ingenious Design of Woodpecker Skull Mechanics

Number of words: 509 Slow-motion footage, X-ray images and computer simulations have shed light on how woodpeckers avoid injuries to their brains as they peck. Their heads move some 6m/s (20ft/s), at each peck enduring a deceleration more than 1,000 times that of gravity. But researchers reporting in Plos One say that unequal upper and lower beak … Read more