BREWED BEHAVIOUR
Lifestyle, Fitness, Health, and more.
The Announcement and the Condition Attached to It
On Wednesday 30 September, Trump announced from the Oval Office that South Korea would invest some 200 billion dollars in American energy projects, including about 54 billion dollars toward a liquefied natural gas project in Alaska. The project is an 807 mile pipeline carrying gas from the North Slope to a liquefaction terminal on the southern coast, from where it could be shipped to Asian markets. Senator Dan Sullivan, facing a competitive...
Building the Option You Hope Not to Use
In the first days of October, while Qatari mediators were carrying messages between Washington and Tehran, the United States military dispatched roughly 9,000 troops toward the Middle East aboard a group of ships. Reporting put the broader buildup at more than 20,000 sailors and Marines in the region, including the Theodore Roosevelt and Makin Island strike groups, bringing a third aircraft carrier into position. Senior administration officials...
The Preference Nobody Chose
The finding arrived by accident. Researchers studying social distancing during the pandemic were reviewing footage of how many people could safely share a room, and noticed that the crowds in the video kept drifting counterclockwise. They then spent several years trying to make the effect go away, and could not. The work, published in Nature Communications by teams from Waseda University, the University of Tokyo, Shanghai University for Science...
The Voice Was Not the Only Thing That Changed
A team at UNSW Sydney set out to answer a question that sounds like a joke and turns out not to be one. Can you get a large language model drunk, and does it matter? Anudeex Shetty, Aditya Joshi and Salil Kanhere tried three methods. They prompted models to respond like a heavily intoxicated person. They fine-tuned models on more than 57,000 genuinely drunk messages gathered from a subreddit and a texts archive. And they used reinforcement...
The Cost of the Hours You Did Not Sleep
Researchers followed 2,750 cognitively healthy older adults, average age 70, for an average of 5.6 years. The group with chronic insomnia, defined as trouble sleeping at least three nights a week for three months or more, had a 40 per cent higher risk of developing mild cognitive impairment or dementia than those without it. In raw terms, 14 per cent of the insomnia group developed one or the other, against 10 per cent of the rest. The...