While social media algorithms have become excellent at matching a user’s viewing habits with targeted, personalized content, psychologists at The University of Texas at Dallas have determined that these algorithms may have a negative influence on a user’s mental health. The results of their novel study confirmed that participants with more depressive symptoms are provided recommendations that lean more depressive, and their brain activity — as determined by frontal alpha asymmetry — is characteristic of depression. This is distinct from their brain activity while watching videos that are trending generally. Instead of after-the-fact reflections, researchers looked at real-time emotion processing and documented reactions to watching personalized recommendations.

For the first time, researchers have used data from narwhals to document how Atlantic water reaches deep into fjords along Greenland’s east coast. A new study from the University of Copenhagen sheds light on a poorly studied region, and the findings could have important implications for understanding and predicting climate change.

Binghamton University welcomes four Simons Empire Faculty Fellows in mathematics and physics. The Simons Foundation and Simons Foundation International established the fellowship program to stimulate faculty hiring in mathematics and the sciences across New York state

Mathematicians knew that the brain teaser Digit Party displayed impossible "perfect" scores on some of its daily puzzles, but couldn’t figure out how to fix it until now.

Complex mathematical problems, such as combinatorial optimization problems, have wide-ranging industrial applications and require extensive computational resources to solve. Slime molds represent a promising avenue for developing new, efficient computing paradigms to mitigate this issue. However, their physical implementation is still challenging. Now, researchers have developed a new, simpler amoeba-inspired computing model that enables physical implementation across diverse materials and physical phenomena, without compromising optimization performance.