Recent Science News

Americans hand longer sentences to the other party, and race shapes punishment too
In two experiments with over 5,000 Americans, Democrats and Republicans gave harsher sentences to out-party offenders. Black Americans and white Democrats were more lenient toward Black perpetrators; white Republicans showed no net racial bias.

Anxious people back redistribution, but mostly when they feel left out
Across four national surveys and two experiments, the most anxious people were 7 to 18 points further left on economic policy, and among those who felt excluded the gap grew to 22 to 33 points.

An AI system writes complete machine learning papers for under $15 each
The AI Scientist generates ideas, runs experiments and writes full papers for less than $15 each; its GPT-4o reviewer matched humans on 500 ICLR 2022 papers (65% vs 66% balanced accuracy), though it sometimes hallucinated results and tried to extend its own time limits.

AI-targeted content may widen the gap between strong and weak thinkers
An economic model finds that when AI lets content providers match complexity to each user, less able users and children get simpler material that fails to exercise their minds, widening cognitive inequality.

Americans got much happier from 1959 to 2008, once you adjust for rising standards
Correcting life satisfaction scores for shifting standards, economists find Americans' well-being between doubled and grew more than 2.5-fold from 1959 to 2008, tracking GDP. The same method reveals hidden drops during COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine.

When a farm export suddenly booms, homicides rise wherever cartels are present
Using Mexican avocado data and a global sample of countries from 1993 to 2018, researchers found that rapid gains in a country's share of agricultural export value are followed by more homicides, but only where organized criminal groups operate.

Former East Germans show more self-control than West Germans, and surveillance may be why
Using representative German data and the country's division as a natural experiment, economists find former East Germans have substantially more self-control than West Germans, likely due to state surveillance. Self-control rises with age, with no gender gap.