Scientists have unveiled a miniature robotic stingray the size of a toenail that sails smoothly through water, guided by pulses of light.

The bio-inspired robot is a made of a mixture of living rat heart cells and artificial material. It is only 16 millimeters long ― less...

「今回の研究結果に対処するのは、セラピストの方が適切かもしれません」

Goats are having a moment. After living with humans for about 10,000 years and being incredibly funny all along, they are finally getting some credit for their intelligence. 

Scientists at Queen Mary University of London recently found that goats might...

How will you ever trust a mirror again after seeing this?

Kokichi Sugihara, a professor at Meiji University in Japan, won second prize in the international Best Illusion of the Year Contest last week for creating a brand-new visual illusion in which a perfectly rectangular shape appears circular when reflected in a mirror.

So how does this fascinating "ambiguous cylinder illusion" work? 

Sugihara has found a class of peculiar shapes made up of irregular sections that can look like either rectangles or circles depending on the viewer's perspective. 

"The direct views of the objects and their mirror images generate quite different interpretations of the 3D shapes," Sugihara explains on the contest's website.

"We cannot correct our interpretations, although we logically know that they come from the same objects," he adds. "Even if the object is rotated in front of a viewer, it is difficult to understand the true shape of the object, and thus the illusion does not disappear,"

Pretty confusing, right? Luckily, anything that an engineer makes can be reversed engineered. And that's exactly what's happening on the Make Anything // 3D Printing YouTube channel. Check out more details on how this illusion works:

Sugihara has previously blown our minds with other award-winning illusions including a structure that seems to defy gravity and a precursor to his new illusion -- a miniature garage roof that changes shapes in a mirror. 

The annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest showcases new illusions created by the research community. An international panel of judges rates the submissions to narrow them to the top 10, then a winner is selected using an online...

Highly religious people in the U.S. may have a love-hate relationship with online pornography, but new research suggests they don’t want to admit it.

A study published June 2 in Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity: The Journal of Treatment &...

You know what your personal space is. Uninvited strangers invading it invoke an immediate sense of unease. A bird flying over but too close to your head may cause you to reflexively duck. It’s like we don’t just end where our bodies end, but a little bit beyond.

Revenge may be sweet, but it also leaves a bitter aftertaste.

The nuances of emotions evoked by acts of revenge are universal and profound (you’d know this well even if your closest encounter with revenge has been watching the latest episodes of “Game...

Imagine being in a dark room holding a flashlight. You can only see where you're pointing the light, and only what the light reaches. This room is your mind, and what the flashlight reveals is your limited awareness of it.

But a new study suggests that people...

We look for attractive people to mate with, cute animals to bring home and nice clothes to wear. So is it any wonder we judge good-looking food to be tastier? This behavior may seem harmless, but it often means that cosmetically challenged fruits and vegetables end...

Your brain has approximately 86 billion neurons joined together through some 100 trillion connections, giving rise to a complex biological machine capable of pulling off amazing feats. Yet it's difficult to truly grasp the sophistication of this interconnected web of cells.

Now, a new work of art...

People can’t make up their moral minds about driverless cars.

In a series of surveys published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers asked people what they believe a driverless car ought to do in the following scenario: A group of pedestrians are crossing the street, and the only way the car can avoid hitting them is by swerving off the road, which would kill the passengers inside.

The participants generally agreed that the cars should be programmed to sacrifice their passengers if doing so would save many other people.

This, broadly speaking, is a utilitarian kind of answer -- one aimed at preserving the greatest possible number of lives. But there's one problem: The people in the survey also said they wouldn't want to ride in these cars themselves.

It would be OK for others to buy them, the participants said, but they personally would not.

“Figuring out how to build ethical autonomous machines is one of the thorniest challenges in artificial intelligence today,” Jean-François Bonnefon, of France's Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, and his colleagues wrote in the study.

The scenario described above is hypothetical, but it and others like it are bound to happen in real life once driverless cars become a mainstream reality, the researchers said. We need answers and rules now, so that we can include them in the programming of these machines. Even if a driverless car has a manual override option, it's easy to imagine a situation where there simply isn't time for a passenger to react and take control of the vehicle.

It can be unnerving to think about this stuff. But autonomous vehicles actually have the potential to create a safer world. In the United States alone, about 35,000 traffic deaths occur every year, along with millions of injuries. 

“Around 90 percent of those accidents are due to human error," Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine, and a co-author of the study, said at a press conference. "Autonomous vehicles promise to change all that for the better, but there are barriers to their wide adoption. A number of those are technological barriers, but they’re also psychological ones."

If you've ever taken an ethics class, you might recognize the driverless-car scenario described above. It shares a lot of DNA with a famous thought experiment known as the trolley problem. In that scenario, you are the engineer of a runaway trolley. On the track ahead of you, five workers are working, oblivious to your approach. You can't brake, but you can switch the trolley onto another track. But there's one person on that track. Would you kill that one worker to save five others?

There are a number of variations on the question. What if that one person is pregnant? What if the five others are criminals? You can imagine how many different ways this can go.

For the study published Thursday, the researchers conducted six online surveys of U.S. residents between June and November 2015, asking participants how they would want their autonomous cars to behave in various scenarios. The researchers tweaked some variables, such as the number of pedestrians or passengers, in each scenario. In some examples, participants had to imagine their child was riding in the car. In others, they were told to imagine riding with their coworkers.

People generally preferred decisions that minimized the number of casualties. In one scenario, 76 percent of respondents said it would be more moral for an autonomous vehicle to sacrifice one passenger if it would save 10 pedestrians.

But this allegiance to the greater good only went so far. People balked when asked if they would purchase these cars themselves. “You can recognize the feeling," Bonnefon said -- it's "the feeling that I want other people to do something, but it would be great not to do it myself."

What should the manufacturers of driverless cars do? And what would happen to public safety if every driverless car was programmed to protect its passengers above all else?

"To maximize safety, people want to live in a world in which everybody owns driverless cars that minimize casualties, but they want their own car to protect them at all costs," said Iyad Rahwan, a researcher at MIT and co-author of the study.

Automakers that offer such cars would probably make a lot of money, Rahwan said. But it's the tragedy of the commons: "If everybody thinks this way then we will end up in a world in which every car will look after its own passenger’s safety and society as a whole is worse off."

However, the researchers believe that public attitudes may change over time. If the technology of autonomous cars improves to the point where riding in them is ultimately safer than driving yourself, people might become more receptive to the idea of buying a car that increases their safety -- even if it's explicitly programmed to allow them to die in certain unlikely situations.

If you have opinions of your own, you can contribute to the discussion at this website created by the...

Lonni Sue Johnson doesn’t remember the scientists she’s been working with over the past few years. She doesn’t remember whether or not she was ever married. She doesn’t remember what happened just a few minutes ago.

But the odd things she does remember have had scientists puzzled...

The brain-training apps that promise to improve memory and boost your IQ may have nothing more than a placebo effect, according to a new study.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Monday, found that...

외향적인 사람들이라 해도 다른 사람들과 함께 있을 때 피곤해지는 영향에서 자유롭지는 않다고 한다.

핀란드 연구자들이 성격 저널에 발표한 새 연구에서는 어떤 성격의 사람이라도, 사람들과 교류하면 그 순간은 즐겁지만 몇 시간 후에는 지치게 된다고 한다.

48명만을 상대로 한 연구이기 때문에, 앞으로 다른 연구에서 다시 실험해 봐야 할 거라고 공동...

勉強が終わったからといって、のんびりしてはいけません。

Faces are everywhere. You see them pretty much every day for pretty much your entire life. Yet if you were to draw a human face, chances are that you would put the eyes in the wrong place. 

Research going back to at least the 1980s, as well...

Here’s your new study routine: Hit the books. Wait a little while. Then, hit the gym.

New research suggests that physical exercise can help people retain information if it happens at the right time -- namely, a few hours after you learn the info, when new memories are getting stabilized...

Not even extroverts are immune from the tiring effects of being around other people.

A new study from researchers in Finland published in the Journal of Personality suggests that no matter which personality group you may belong to, interacting with people might make you happy...

When we fall sleep, the brain continues to process words it hears. It can tell a cat from a hat. But as we go into the dreaming stage of sleep, the brain seems not to care about the external world anymore. 

In a new study...

The silver ribbon of stars that wraps the night sky has long been an awe-inspiring sight for anyone who cares to look up. But that’s not the case anymore for people who live under...