zlatiah

People are increasingly using video calls for high-stakes interactions that once required face-to-face contact... But video calling introduces a new communication issue: minor glitches, or intermittent errors in the transmission of audiovisual information during a virtual interaction.

Here, through five experiments and three supplementary studies using both live and recorded interactions, we show that minor audiovisual glitches during video calls harm interpersonal judgements in consequential life domains (for example, hiring decisions after a virtual interview, or trust in a medical provider after a telehealth visit). In addition, two archival datasets from real-world video calls reveal that glitches are associated with both reduced social connection and a lower likelihood of being granted criminal parole.

We find that audiovisual glitches damage interpersonal judgements because they break the illusion of face-to-face contact (for example, by distorting faces, misaligning audio and visual cues or making movements appear ‘choppy’), evoking ‘uncanniness’—a strange, creepy or eerie feeling. As the uncanniness of a glitch increases, so does its negative effect on interpersonal judgements. Furthermore, audiovisual glitches undermine interpersonal judgements only in video calls that simulate face-to-face interaction, showing that the negative effect produced by glitches goes beyond mere disruptiveness, comprehension difficulties and negative attributions...

Despite being considered a boon to access, virtual communication might unintentionally perpetuate inequality. Because disadvantaged groups often have poorer internet connections, they are likely to encounter more glitches, and, in turn, to experience worse outcomes in consequential contexts such as health, careers, justice and social connection.

Paper (linked in post) is paywalled; try this direct link to the PDF if you can't access it (let me know if this doesn't work)

Also see their data and code source on ResearchBox

Associated Nature News report: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03820-z.

Additional context:

Native speakers of my mother tongue do not all understand each other due to some pretty extreme dialects. Now that I'm in Europe, I've noticed multiple instances of people sometimes not understand the dialect of someone from a village 10-20 km away...

In contrast, for example most American, British, and Australian people can just... understand each other like that?? I never thought much about it before but it's pretty incredible

Edit: thanks everyone, and clearly I didn't think of certain parts of the UK when I was in the shower and thought of this...

Excerpts in case of paywall; the archive.org link isn't working:

Generative conversational artificial-intelligence systems, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are being used to optimize tasks, plan holidays and seek advice on matters ranging from the trivial to the existential... Against this backdrop, the urgent question is: can the same conversational skills that make AI into helpful assistants also turn them into powerful political actors? In a pair of studies in Nature and Science, researchers show that dialogues with large language models (LLMs) can shift people’s attitudes towards political candidates and policy issues. The researchers also identify which features of conversational AI systems make them persuasive, and what risks they might pose for democracy.

The effects were striking. Conversations favouring one candidate increased support for that candidate by around 2–3 points on a scale of 0–100, which is larger than the average effect of political advertising. Persuasion was stronger when the chat focused on policy issues rather than the candidate’s personality, and when the AI provided specific evidence or examples. Importantly, roughly one-third of the effect persisted when participants were contacted a month later, going against the intuitive critique that the initial shifts were probably volatile and ultimately inconsequential.

The persuasive influence was also asymmetric: AI chatbots were more successful at persuading ‘out-party’ participants (that is, those who initially opposed the targeted candidate) than at mobilizing existing supporters. In the state-level ballot-measure experiment in Massachusetts, persuasion effects were even larger, reaching double digits on the 0–100 scale.

Analysing 27 rhetorical strategies used by the AI models to persuade voters who engaged with them, the team found that supplying factual information was one of the strongest predictors of success... Yet ‘facts’ were not always factual. When the team fact-checked thousands of statements produced by the AI models, they found that most were accurate, but not all. Across countries and language models, claims made by AI chatbots that promoted right-leaning candidates were substantially more inaccurate than claims advocating for left-leaning ones. These findings carry the uncomfortable implication that political persuasion by AI tools can exploit imbalances in what the models ‘know’, spreading uneven inaccuracies even under explicit instructions to remain truthful.

It is important to note that these findings come from controlled online experiments. It is unclear how such persuasive effects would play out in real political environments in which exposure to persuasive AI agents is (often) voluntary and conscious. Such environments also contain a myriad of contrasting messages competing for attention, and users can ultimately decide to avoid or ignore specific information sources.

The Nature paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09771-9

Somehow I can't find or access the Science paper mentioned by the news article. If someone can find it please comment

See title. I realized that trash collection systems sometimes differ between streets... so this is just about where you live, whether it is one specific street/building or an entire country. No need to mention exactly where if you don't feel comfortable.

For where I currently live. Government makes colored trash bags (plastics/metals, papers, organic, general waste, etc) that people can buy at local supermarkets, and these bags are required for trash collection. On collection day we just... place the bags outside of the houses/apartments. Some places buy their own trash bins too, but they are rare.

The place I live in seem to take recycling very seriously. I've heard from colleagues that putting the wrong things in a bag sometimes result in the "trash police" sending a fine to where you live. Allegedly the police do that by looking at where your last letter/Amazon/random delivery address (in your paper recycling bag) was sent to...

My understanding is that it is a surprisingly effective recycling system... but with the downside that 1) the city doesn't look particularly great on/after trash collection day, and 2) sometimes the local wildlife will rip open the trash bags

Edit: some more details regarding where I live if anyone is interested. Most people only use four colored bags that are collected per week: blue (plastic, metal, something else...), yellow (paper-based recyclables), white ("residual", essentially non-recyclable items), and orange (kitchen waste). There are also bags for garden waste and heavy waste, but they are not picked up from residential addresses. Glass is either returned to the supermarket (beer bottles) or disposed of at specific dropoff bins. Things like batteries/electronics are specific, I just take them back to the store. There are also pink bags, but they are only used by businesses

This is something I'm curious about that is tied to housing shortages... As in, say a hypothetical government want to encourage real-estate develpers to build more housing to solve housing shortages. But said government still wants to make most of its citizens happy, instead of just cramming everyone in the smallest accommodations possible

As extreme examples:

• A shoebox studio (<= 10 m^2) is probably too small for almost any family
• On the contrary... a massive estate (>= 10,000 m^2) is probably too big for almost any family. At that point, upkeep of the house may need several full-time housekeepers, so you literally won't have time to do it yourself

I'd imagine there might be some cultural differences regarding this as well...?

See title. I've been to quite a few local language meetups and saw lots of people IRL who are learning languages: wondering how are y'all doing too

For myself... learning French due to necessity. I am making progress, just veeery slow. I underestimated how difficult it would be (a lot of vocabs between English/French are similar... but the languages themselves are not!)

When it comes to preventing Alzheimer’s disease, every step counts. For older people whose brains have begun to show molecular signs of the disease, but who have yet to display any cognitive symptoms, taking as few as 3,000 to 5,000 steps per day can help to stave off mental decline, a study finds.

That level of activity slows cognitive decline by 3 years, on average, the results show. And in similar individuals who walk further, taking 5,000 to 7,500 steps per day, decline slows by an average of 7 years. The work also offers hints to how exercise alters the brain to offer this protection.

The benefits of taking 3,000 to 7,500 steps per day were apparent only for participants with high baseline levels of amyloid-β in their brains. Their mental decline was slowed — by 3 to 7 years — compared with participants who were sedentary. The researchers didn’t see any further slowing of mental decline in participants who took more than 7,500 steps a day... Brain scans revealed that higher levels of physical activity specifically slowed the build-up of tau; amyloid-β accumulation continued on its upwards trajectory... Among participants with low baseline levels of amyloid-β — and therefore a low risk of Alzheimer’s disease — exercise levels had no effect on cognitive trajectory.

The associated study on Nature Medicine which is open access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-03955-6

Title. If you have children & prepared costumes for them I'd love to hear as well!

Asking because Halloween was never really big wherever I lived, and a combination of shyness + perfectionism basically prevented me from ever getting a costume... so in a sense I'd like to have some inspiration

Poised on a humanmade landing platform at the entrance of a cave in northern Germany, an invasive brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) lunges at a bat and yanks it out of the air, after which it quickly becomes dinner. The discovery—documented in infrared above and reported this month in Global Ecology and Conservation—marks the first time researchers have captured rats hunting bats by grabbing them from the sky.

Scientists staked out Segeberger Kalkberg cave—about 50 kilometers north of Hamburg—between 2021 and 2024. The site is home to thousands of bats, including Natterer’s bats (Myotis nattereri) and Daubenton’s bats (M. daubentonii). The team documented 30 predation attempts and 13 kills over this period—with rats at the platform (part of a bat-counting device) either grabbing bats midflight or shortly after they landed. The behavior is all the more impressive given that the rodents hunt at night, when they are effectively blind; the rats may rely on their whiskers to detect changes in air currents caused by the bats’ flapping wings.

Given the rodents’ hunting prowess, the scientists estimate that even a small number of rats could remove thousands of bats from the cave. That makes rats a previously underappreciated decimator of these ecologically important species and a possible transmitter of bat-borne pathogens such as coronaviruses and paramyxoviruses. Scientists have previously captured video of animals eating bats in other caves—a potential route for virus transmission.

The news article is paywalled but the scientific paper is not. Link is below: the paper contains quite a few really cool videos of the rat catching a bat in mid-air, as well as discussions on conservation/biodiversity (as the rats in question are an invasive species)

Paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2351989425004950

Relatively new arXiv preprint that got featured on Nature News, I slightly adjusted the title to be less technical. The discovery was done using aggregated online Q&A... one of the funnier sources being 2000 popular questions from r/AmITheAsshole that were rated YTA by the most upvoted response. Study seems robust, and they even did several-hundred participants trials with real humans.

A separate preprint measured sycophancy across various LLMs in a math competition-context (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04721), where apparently GPT-5 was the least sycophantic (+29.0), and DeepSeek-V3.1 was the most (+70.2)

The Nature News report (which I find a bit too biased towards researchers): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03390-0

Asking because I only recently realized that I've been running KDE default wallpapers for over a year without noticing. I'm also debating whether to switch to something more "fun" and aligned to my hobbies

As far as I'm aware, popular OSes/DEs tend to have a healthy selection of high-quality default wallpapers, and some OSes/DEs even have wallpaper "shops". So I'd like to ask what you all use! If you are using a custom one, love to hear where/why you got it.

If you want to share your custom wallpaper feel free to

Edit: thank you all! I didn't realize how many of you use solid colors... as well as the number of people who don't think too much about wallpapers since you don't look at it often (frankly the same for me). For the ones who shared: thanks a ton. Also fun story: there was a recurring joke on r/Unixporn about anime wallpapers but I guess it is not remotely as popular outside of the ricing community

"Efforts to study the female reproductive system have long been set back by societal stigma—but also by the problematic fact that most laboratory animals don’t menstruate. Now, researchers have engineered mice that get a period in response to certain drugs, according to a preprint posted to bioRxiv this month."

"In the new work, Harvard University reproductive biologist Kara McKinley and colleagues engineered standard lab mice’s endometrium to react to signals at work in menstruating animals. They equipped the cells with a receptor protein that, when activated by a drug, amplifies their sensitivity to calcium, a trigger of decidualization."

News article may have paywall but the preprint itself doesn't. The preprint in question: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.08.681007v1