Study finds our brains are ‘programmed’ to learn more from people we like

Study finds our brains are ‘programmed’ to learn more from people we like

Lund University: Our brains are “programmed” to learn more from people we like—and less from those we dislike. This has been shown by researchers in cognitive neuroscience in a series of experiments. Their findings are published in Communications Psychology. Memory serves a vital function, enabling us to learn from new experiences and update existing knowledge. We learn both from individual experiences and from connecting them to draw new conclusions about the world. This way, we can make inferences about things…

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Biden’s new plan for the Middle East is more of the same

Biden’s new plan for the Middle East is more of the same

Matthew Duss writes: In the wake of the horrific Oct. 7 attacks, U.S. President Joe Biden and his administration have stressed that there can be no return to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo. “It also means that when this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next. And in our view, it has to be a two-state solution,” Biden said at an Oct. 25 press conference. Last month, the administration offered a preview of its…

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Ireland, Spain want EU to review Israel’s human rights compliance in Gaza

Ireland, Spain want EU to review Israel’s human rights compliance in Gaza

Reuters reports: The prime ministers of Spain and Ireland asked the European Commission on Wednesday to urgently review whether Israel is complying with its human rights obligations in Gaza. At least 1,200 Israelis were killed and around 250 were taken hostage in a raid by Hamas militants on southern Israel on Oct. 7, prompting Israel to retaliate. At least 28,576 Palestinians have since been killed in Israeli strikes, the health ministry in Gaza said on Wednesday. Palestinians jammed into their…

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Why Biden’s pause on new LNG export terminals is a BFD

Why Biden’s pause on new LNG export terminals is a BFD

Yale Climate Connections reports: Natural gas has long been touted as a “bridge fuel” to a clean energy future that gets all its power from renewable sources like wind, solar, and geothermal power. That’s because natural gas produces about half as much carbon dioxide as coal when burned to generate electricity. But researchers have warned for years that natural gas — whose main ingredient is climate-warming methane — is not the trouble-free substitute for coal that the oil and gas…

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The tangled fates of Fani Willis and her biggest case

The tangled fates of Fani Willis and her biggest case

Charles Bethea writes: This past August, Manny Arora, a lawyer in Atlanta, considered an unusual challenge to the charges brought against his client Kenneth Chesebro. Arora, who is in his fifties, is an unflappable retired Air Force prosecutor. He has argued cases on behalf of the former N.F.L. star Adam (Pacman) Jones and Gucci Mane, the Atlanta rapper. Chesebro was a big client, too: a Harvard-trained lawyer and one of the alleged architects of Donald Trump’s scheme to have several…

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U.S. has new intelligence about Russia’s nuclear capabilities

U.S. has new intelligence about Russia’s nuclear capabilities

The New York Times reports: The United States has informed Congress and its allies in Europe of new intelligence about Russian nuclear capabilities that could pose an international threat, according to officials briefed on the matter. Officials said that the new intelligence was serious — but that the capability was still under development, and Russia had not deployed it. Consequently, it did not pose an urgent threat to the United States, Ukraine or America’s European allies, they said. The information…

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Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out

Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out

Derek Thompson writes: In its earliest decades, the United States was celebrated for its citizens’ extroversion. Americans weren’t just setting out to build new churches and new cities. Their associations were, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “of a thousand different types … religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute.” Americans seemed adept at forming social groups: political associations, labor unions, local memberships. It was as if the continent itself had imbued its residents…

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A new look at our linguistic roots

A new look at our linguistic roots

Kurt Kleiner writes: Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Languages as different as English, Russian, Hindustani, Latin and Sanskrit can all be traced back to this ancestral language. Over the last couple of hundred years, linguists have figured out a lot about that first Indo-European language, including many of the words it used and some of the grammatical rules that…

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Biden administration investigating Israel’s possible war crimes — despite public claims to the contrary

Biden administration investigating Israel’s possible war crimes — despite public claims to the contrary

HuffPost reports: A month ago, White House spokesperson John Kirby declared Washington was so confident in Israel’s U.S.-backed offensive in Gaza that the U.S. did not need to investigate its actions. “I’m not aware of any kind of formal assessment being done by the United States government to analyze the compliance with international law by our partner Israel,” Kirby told reporters on Jan. 4, as the Biden administration rallied to defend Israel against an International Court of Justice case arguing…

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Young Israelis block aid to Gaza while IDF soldiers stand and watch

Young Israelis block aid to Gaza while IDF soldiers stand and watch

The Washington Post reports: In Gaza, families are eating animal feed to survive. Ninety-three percent of the population of over 2 million faces “crisis levels of hunger,” a U.N.-backed consortium reported in late December. Hadas Kremer, a 17-year-old with curly blond hair from the Orthodox settlement of Otniel near Hebron, explains that Palestinians who are unhappy and hungry in Gaza should leave. Israel pays for them to exit, she says. In reality, the vast majority of Gazans have no way…

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Democrats should pick a new presidential candidate now

Democrats should pick a new presidential candidate now

Damon Linker writes: The Democratic Party is heading into the 2024 election with a presumptive nominee who may well be incapable of defeating former President Donald Trump. The incumbent on whom the party is relying to run against Trump’s dangerous threat to the country and the world currently rates at an anemic and steady 39 percent approval. Worse, no less than three-quarters of Americans and half of Democrats worry that President Joe Biden lacks “the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a…

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Trump and the GOP’s fascist rhetoric has broad appeal, poll finds

Trump and the GOP’s fascist rhetoric has broad appeal, poll finds

Rolling Stone reports: Donald Trump’s fascistic rhetoric about how immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, as well as the GOP’s embrace of the “great replacement theory,” are repellent to many Americans. But for a startling number of people, new survey results exclusively provided to Rolling Stone reveal, the message that immigrants pose a dark threat to the nation is being met with enthusiasm — or a dangerous shrug of indifference. More than a third of Trump’s 2020 voters…

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EU climate policy is dangerously reliant on untested carbon-capture technology

EU climate policy is dangerously reliant on untested carbon-capture technology

An editorial in Nature says: Last week, the European Commission published its long-awaited recommendations for climate targets for 2040. The commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, is recommending that EU member states cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 90% by 2040, compared with 1990 levels. If countries agree, this would be an interim milestone, ahead of the European Climate Law, which sets out a legally binding target for net-zero emissions by 2050. A target cut of 90% is…

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Expressive responding: Political partisanship can lead to willful disregard for facts, study suggests

Expressive responding: Political partisanship can lead to willful disregard for facts, study suggests

PsyPost reports: Have you ever wondered if people really believe the controversial statements they make, especially in today’s politically charged environment? A recent study sheds light on this question, revealing that political affiliation may influence how people respond to factual questions, not necessarily reflecting their true beliefs but rather their allegiance to a political group. This phenomenon, known as “expressive responding,” was the focus of a recent replication study aimed at understanding how partisanship affects perceptions of truth in the…

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