Suspicious eyes
In the year 2001, US president George W. Bush foreshadowed a hope that decades later would pervade the robotics industry. Bush stood next to Russian president Vladimir Putin at a press conference in Slovenia and said of him: 鈥�.鈥�
In the period since then, roboticists have theorised that putting eyes (or at least things that look like eyes) on robots would induce people to trust those robots. Trust them more, that is, than they would trust an eyeless counterpart.
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Now, Artur Pilacinski and his team of robot researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, and the University of Coimbra, Portugal, have tested the eyes/trust assumption.
They discovered that eyes did induce some people to have some trust in some robots. But it was less reliable trust, they concluded, than meets the eye. Their report, called 鈥溾��, appears in the journal Heliyon.
鈥淲e found,鈥� they say about collaboration with eyed robots, that 鈥渢he objective markers such as pupil size and task completion time indicated it was in fact less comfortable to collaborate with eyed robots鈥�.
The worth of this visionary engineering idea, like Bush鈥檚 sense, remains to be seen.
Whom Dad saw
Tom Marinov adds spousal-history detection and discernment to Feedback鈥檚 growing record of trivial superpowers. He says: 鈥淢y mother Zdravka could guess who my father had met during that day on his travels in Canberra. Sometimes these were friends he had not seen in many years. He would wager something, and she always got it in three.鈥�
Poo-pooping proofs
The year 2023 has already produced three, maybe four scientific papers that 鈥� by existing 鈥� pooh-pooh the notion that all scientists are prudish.
The journal Molecular Ecology Resources gives us: 鈥�.鈥�
Researchers in Illinois present their report: 鈥�.鈥�
And the Authorea preprint repository offers a counterpart: 鈥�.鈥�
We can add a fourth to thispoo/poop/poop collection, if you allow triple-letter acronyms into the mix. A study presented at the 2023 4th International Conference for Emerging Technology is called 鈥溾��.
The abstract begins with this icky-cutesy declaration: 鈥淭his paper introduces the Proof of Opinion (PoO) consensus algorithm as an alternative to the traditional Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) algorithms.鈥�
Apple appeal
Does an apple a day keep diseases away? There had never been a clear answer agreeable to the whole medical profession. Now, maybe there is.
A team of nine researchers based at Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in China gathered more than 200 apple-related medical studies from the past decade. They perused. They pondered. They published, in .
This study exemplifies a broad swathe of medical reports about a broad swathe of medical questions. It winds up with a rousing maybe-perhaps statement. 鈥淚n conclusion,鈥� it says, 鈥渢he effects of apples and apple derivatives on disease risk reduction are both challenging and encouraging.鈥�
Apples appeal to many hardcore scientists (as well as to Bible literalists and, of course, to anyone who has a literal taste for apples). They offer tantalisation and mystery, even 鈥� and maybe especially 鈥� to scientists who study brains. In a called 鈥淭he underpinning of meaningful activities by brain correlates鈥�, a team in Belgium invokes apples while explaining that 鈥渁ctivities of daily living are difficult to perform in a lab or clinic鈥�.
The researchers point specifically to an activity that is the focus of a Japanese study called 鈥溾��.
The apple-peeling study shows how very difficult apple-centric research can be. It shows a photograph with the caption 鈥淎 subject, lying supine in an fMRI environment, performs a mock-peeling task while observing his hands, an apple and a plastic knife model through a mirror鈥�.
Difficulty doesn鈥檛 preclude progress, however. An Iranian study published in 2021 in the Avicenna Journal of Dental Research titled 鈥溾�� reveals one of the countless surprises apples offer to science.
鈥淐hewing yellow apples,鈥� it says, 鈥渨as discovered to be [a] more effective method in reducing dental plaque than chewing red apples or using toothbrushes.鈥�
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