Synthetic public opinion polling: AI personas don't always change their minds like real voters do
A voter surveyed in October may give a different answer by January. An AI persona might not, depending on how it's built.
Explore the latest scientific discoveries, science news, breakthroughs and developments from around the world.
A voter surveyed in October may give a different answer by January. An AI persona might not, depending on how it's built.
Much is being made of a record-strength El NiΓ±o event that could well spell a drier, windier summer for the north and east of New Zealand. But, as a major new assessment shows, it is forming against a backdrop of warming that's pushed the country's climate into "uncharted territory."
Preliminary results from an ongoing long-term survey conducted by William & Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) suggest that an average year class of young-of-year striped bass was produced in the Virginia tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay in 2026. Striped bass are an important top predator in the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem and a valuable resource for commercial and recreational anglers. The 2026 year class, representing fish hatched this spring, will reach fishable sizes in three to four years.
After a cyclospora outbreak and recalls of imported beef over the summer, a recent Gallup poll found that Americans' confidence in food safety has fallen to a record low, and consumers may be wondering how foodborne illness outbreaks can be tracked and mitigated.
A technology developed at The University of Queensland allowing scientists to observe how disease-related proteins behave inside living neurons will be used to advance early drug discovery for neurodegenerative diseases. The NASTIC (Nanoscale Spatiotemporal Indexing Clustering) platform, spun out into Brisbane-based startup Accretion Bio, enables researchers to study real-time biological processes in living cells across space and time at the single-molecule level for the first time.
The public K-12 school system in the United States has become pervasively shaped by standardized testing.
If you've ever created a snowflake by folding, cutting and unfolding a piece of paper, you've practiced the art of kirigami. Like origami, kirigami has inspired innovations far beyond the elementary school classroom, with applications ranging from deployable structures for spacecraft to semiconductors.
Cells constantly recycle proteins and other cellular components. But how do they ensure that the right cargo ends up in the right recycling vesicleβone of the cell's transport carriers? A team at the University of Basel has identified a molecular switch that controls this process. The small protein ARF-1 ensures that recyclable cargo is efficiently loaded into transport vesicles and returned to the cell's surface.
As governments prepare to gather in Yerevan, Armenia, this week for the U.N. Biodiversity Conference (COP17), new research identifies 13% of Earth's land area as hotspots for biodiversity conservation, highlighting where conservation efforts are most urgently needed.
As climate change is expected to increase the risks associated with extreme rainfall and flooding, managing floods requires approaches beyond conventional infrastructure such as dams and reservoirs.
Scientists have unveiled a new theory on the birth of the cosmos, suggesting the early universe was shaped by an ancient particle that has been overlooked for decades.
A University of Mississippi study is adding nuance to a debate over how often police interrogation tactics can produce false confessions leading to wrongful convictions. In a recent simulation study published in the Journal of Criminal Justice, Ole Miss criminal justice and legal studies professors Mary Catlin and Thomas Bryan Smith found that the predicted likelihood of a false confession grows with the length of a police interrogation.