Quirky Science

In our digital world, are young people losing the ability to read emotions?

Children's social skills may be declining as they have less time for face-to-face interaction due to their increased use of digital media, according to a UCLA psychology study, published in the online edition of edition of Computers in Human Behavior.
UCLA scientists found that sixth-graders who went five days without even glancing at a smartphone, television or other digital screen did substantially better at reading human emotions than sixth-graders from the same school who continued to spend hours each day looking at their electronic devices.
“Many people are looking at the benefits of digital media in education, and not many are looking at the costs," writes Patricia Greenfield, a distinguished professor of psychology in the UCLA College and senior author of the study. “The displacement of in-person social interaction by screen interaction seems to be reducing social skills."

Photo Courtesy: University Of Leeds

'Tickling' your ear could be good for your heart

Stimulating nerves in your ear could improve the health of your heart, researchers have discovered. A team at the University of Leeds used a standard TENS machine like those designed to relieve labour pains to apply electrical pulses to the tragus, the small raised flap at the front of the ear immediately in front of the ear canal.
The stimulation changed the influence of the nervous system on the heart by reducing the nervous signals that can drive failing hearts too hard.
Professor Jim Deuchars, of Leeds writes, “You feel a bit of a tickling sensation in your ear when the TENS machine is on, but it is painless. It is early days -- so far we have been testing this on healthy subjects -- but we think it does have potential to improve the health of the heart and might even become part of the treatment for heart failure."

Influenced by self-interest, humans less concerned about inequity to others, researchers find

Strongly influenced by their self-interest, humans do not protest being overcompensated, even when there are no consequences, researchers in Georgia State University's Brains and Behavior Program have found.
This could imply that humans are less concerned than previously believed about the inequity of others, researchers said. Their findings are published in the journal Brain Connectivity. These findings suggest humans' sense of unfairness is affected by their self-interest, indicating the interest humans show in others' outcomes is a recently evolved propensity.
The researchers report that, contrary to expectations, humans do not show any sensitivity when they are overcompensated. They conclude that humans are more interested in their own outcomes than those of others. The study is published in the journal Brain Connectivity.

'Robo Brain' will teach robots everything from the Internet

Robo Brain—a large-scale computational system that learns from publicly available Internet resources—is currently downloading and processing about 1 billion images, 120,000 YouTube videos, and 100 million how-to documents and appliance manuals. The information is being translated and stored in a robot-friendly format that robots will be able to draw on when they need it.

To serve as helpers in our homes, offices and factories, robots will need to understand how the world works and how the humans around them behave. Robotics researchers have been teaching them these things one at a time: How to find your keys, pour a drink, put away dishes, and when not to interrupt two people having a conversation. This will all come in one package with Robo Brain.

"If a robot encounters a situation it hasn't seen before it can query Robo Brain in the cloud," says Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University.