Author: Ranveer Kumar
A new study has found that people can classify a photo of an unfamiliar politician as either an autocrat or a democratically-elected leader, with an accuracy of almost 70%. The participants also rated the photos of elected leaders as more attractive, likable, and trustworthy than those of the dictators. The research paper, conducted by Canada-based researchers Miranda Giacomin, Alexander Mulligan, and Nicholas O. Rule, was published on February 4 in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. Politicians’ faces influence voters People’s faces offer many clues about their social status, personality, and political leanings. For example, even children can pick the winner of foreign elections based on quick…
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea Culture matters more than a leader’s gender in how a nation survives a global pandemic, according to a study I conducted on gender and COVID-19 management, which was published in December in the journal PLOS ONE. My co-authors and I examined COVID-19 cases and deaths in 175 countries, 16 of which are led by women. We identified no statistically significant differences in deaths based on the gender of the country’s leader. Instead, we found that pandemic outcomes hinged primarily on how egalitarian a country is. Countries that…
Johnny Depp has failed in his attempt to challenge the ruling in the U.K. High Court that he was violent to his former wife Amber Heard. Last year, the actor waged a three-week libel case against the publisher of The Sun newspaper over a 2018 article calling him a “wife beater.” Depp claimed that Heard’s allegations of domestic violence were “a choreographed hoax.” However, Judge Andrew Nicol found that Depp had been violent toward Heard on at least 12 occasions, and rejected Depp’s case. Depp sought permission to appeal the ruling, claiming the judge had failed to assess the evidence properly and calling…
The voting machine firm says Fox News pushed the false claims to make a profit. New Trump recording revealed Audio from a phone recording appears to show the former president asking a Georgia state official to help overturn election results. ABC News’ Alex Presha has the details. Dominion Voting Systems on Friday morning filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, alleging that the conservative network pushed false accusations that the voting company had rigged the 2020 election, in order to make a profit and boost ratings. “Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its…
The Energy Department set a goal of achieving 2 cents/kWh by 2030, and announced an initial $128 million in funding to support technology development. The U.S. Department of Energy announced a goal to cut the cost of solar energy by 60% within the next 10 years. It also announced nearly $128 million in funding to lower costs, improve performance, and speed the deployment of solar energy technologies. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm said that solar is already cheaper than coal and other fossil fuels in many parts of the country. “With more innovation we can cut the cost again…
Scotland has narrowly missed a target to generate the equivalent of 100% of its electricity demand from renewables in 2020. New figures reveal it reached 97.4% from renewable sources. This target was set in 2011, when renewable technologies generated just 37% of national demand. Industry body Scottish Renewables said output had tripled in the last 10 years, with enough power for the equivalent of seven million households. Chief executive Claire Mack, said: “Scotland’s climate change targets have been a tremendous motivator to the industry to increase deployment of renewable energy sources. “Renewable energy projects are displacing tens of millions of tonnes…
SARS-CoV-2 may be settling into a limited set of mutations No doubt you’ve heard about the novel coronavirus variants that are evolving around the world. There now appear to be more than a dozen versions of SARS-CoV-2, which are of varying degrees of concern because some are linked to increased infectivity and lethality while others are not. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by this diversity and to fear that we’ll never achieve herd immunity. Yet evidence is growing that these variants share similar combinations of mutations. This may not be the multifront war that many are dreading, with an infinite…
Warmer temperatures and higher humidity may be key factors Lightning is relatively uncommon in the Arctic—the air is usually not warm enough for thunderstorms. Now that might be changing, new data suggests. A study recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds that Arctic lightning has tripled in the last decade alone. The researchers, led by Bob Holzworth of the University of Washington, analyzed data collected by the World Wide Lightning Location Network between 2010 and 2020. The network, operated by the University of Washington, has lightning sensors all over the world. The new study focused on summer lightning flashes, or “strokes,” detected…
Octopuses have alternating periods of “quiet” and “active” sleep that make their rest similar to that of mammals, despite being separated by more than 500 million years of evolution. During their active periods of sleep, octopuses’ skin color changes and their bodies twitch, according to a report in the journal iScience, and they might even have short dreams. “If they are dreaming, they are dreaming for up to a minute,” says Sidarta Ribeiro, a neuroscientist at the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. It’s been clear for awhile that octopuses can change color as they sleep; videos of this…
A new meta-analysis suggests that aerobic exercise could help alleviate the often grueling symptoms of hemodialysis, including depression, fatigue and cramps, advancing researchers’ understanding of the relationship between exercise and treatments for kidney failure. Researchers with the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg reviewed 15 randomized controlled trials involving a total of 508 patients — 283 of whom were assigned exercise interventions — dating back to 1964 to examine the effect of aerobic exercise on symptoms related to hemodialysis, The process of purifying the blood of people whose kidneys aren’t functioning properly Their review, published Thursday in the Clinical Journal OF…