How Chicago robot tutors are teaching SEL effectively–without pretending to be human
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 21-Jun-2026 08:16 ET (21-Jun-2026 12:16 GMT/UTC)
When neuroscientist and musician AZA Allsop discovered research by his Yale colleague Joy Hirsch about how group drumming and musical interaction can affect social behavior, he knew there was a collaboration in their future.
Five years later, their joint work has shown that music is a powerful social enhancer that directly impacts brain functioning.
“When I reached out to see if we could work together on a project focused on music, Joy was as excited as I was,” said Allsop, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine who is also a jazz artist. “As we drafted our new research, I really relied on my background in music production, theory, and performance to help shape things.”
Hirsch, also a neuroscientist, brought her own musical experience to the partnership. A veteran competitive ballroom dancer, she has won many accolades including national championship titles.
“AZA and I connected immediately, because of our shared love of music, our experience with music in one form or another, and our commitment to understanding how the brain operates under music conditions,” said Hirsch, the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry and professor of comparative medicine and of neuroscience.
In a new study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, they find that listening to harmonically consonant chord progressions during face-to-face interaction strengthened neural activity in brain areas that help people understand and respond to others.
The findings suggest that music may help promote social bonding on a biological level, they say, explaining why it often plays an important role in social rituals and group experiences.The latest data on the scale of drink spiking in the UK will be presented to the public for the first time at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) this Saturday (21 March) as part of the Cambridge Festival, organised by the University of Cambridge.
A national survey by forensic scientists at ARU and charity Drinkaware, carried out by YouGov and involving 7,256 UK adults, found approximately 2% of adults reported being a victim of drink spiking in the previous 12 months. When extrapolated across the UK population, this equates to nearly one million people. However, fewer than one in four (23%) contacted the police.
Women were most likely to be victims (58%), bars were the most common location (41%) and 25-34-year-olds reported the highest number of incidents. In addition to covering the prevalence of drink spiking, Saturday’s event will also focus on research into analysing drink residues and evaluations of drink testing kits and protective products.The bright colors of butterfly wings, the sweet aromas of flowers and the euphonious melodies of songbirds all evolved as signals that help individuals propagate, yet humans also find these very same signals pleasing to their own senses. In a study published today, Mar. 19, in Science, scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) collaborated with researchers in U.S., Canada, and New Zealand to show that humans and animals not only express the same subjective preferences for one type of signal—particular animal mating calls. In addition, across the range and complexity of the animal sounds found in nature, humans and animals show overlapping preferences for certain qualities of an animal’s call. These findings indicate that preferences for some animal sounds are more universal than previously known.
Following the first independent investigation in fifty years of Monte Verde – a landmark archaeological site in Chile – researchers report it may be much younger than previously believed. According to the study, Monte Verde dates from ~8000 to 4000 years old, not 14,500 years, as previously thought. The findings reshape the story of the continent’s first settlers (though they don’t rule out pre-Clovis human presence in South America, as supported by other sites); they also highlight the need for independent verification of old archeological sites. Monte Verde is one of the most important archaeological sites for understanding when humans first reached South America, the last continent colonized by humans. Excavations of the site’s Monte Verde II component uncovered stone tools and well-preserved organic materials, such as wooden artifacts, cordage, and fossil remains of extinct Pleistocene fauna. Earlier dating suggested that the site was occupied roughly 14,500 years ago, making it nearly 1,500 years older than the Clovis culture – the once-dominant benchmark for earliest human settlement in the Americas. Although widely accepted as key evidence of a pre-Clovis human presence in southern South America, the findings from Monte Verde have long been debated. Critics have questioned whether the artifacts, sediment layers, and radiocarbon dates are truly associated, raising possibilities such as redeposited ancient material or dating inaccuracies that could exaggerate the site’s age.
Now, Todd Surovell and colleagues show that the antiquity of Monte Verde may have been overestimated. Surovell et al. reexamined the age and geological context of Monte Verde II by describing, sampling, and dating nine sediment exposures along the banks of the nearby Chinchihuapi Creek. The analysis shows that the abandoned floodplain on which the site resides is far more complex than previously understood. According to the findings, the area contains layers of sand and gravel deposited by glacial meltwater between about 26,000 and 15,500 years ago, followed by deposits of ancient wood, marsh sediments, and a volcanic ash layer identified as the regionally widespread Lepúe Tephra, which is well-dated to roughly 11,000 years ago. The authors argue that because the floodplain deposit containing the archaeological site sits above this ash layer, it must be younger than 11,000 years. Further radiocarbon dating of wood and peat from the floodplain sediments produced ages between ~8200 and 4100 years, indicating that the deposit formed during the Middle Holocene. The authors suggest that earlier dates previously reported for the site were likely influenced by Late Pleistocene-age materials from older sediments that were redeposited into the site via erosion. The findings suggest that Monte Verde II is Middle Holocene in age or younger, challenging earlier interpretations that placed the site much earlier in the late Ice Age.
In a Perspective, Jason Rech discusses the study as well as the implications of the findings. “Although Monte Verde grounded chronologies for early colonization of the Americas for decades, the landscape is different now, with more sites that appear to be older than the Clovis culture,” Rech writes. “Yet as Surovell et al. conclude, their findings highlight the need for independent verification of old archeological sites.”
Do humans share a sense of acoustic beauty with other animals? According to a new study, the answer may be yes. In a global citizen-science experiment, researchers show that humans tend to prefer many of the same animal sounds that animals themselves favor – findings that offer support for Charles Darwin’s longstanding idea that different species can share a “taste for the beautiful.” Across the animal kingdom, animals produce sounds to communicate and attract mates. Although mating calls and songs vary within a species, those listening for them often favor certain variations over others. These preferences can arise from inherent sensory biases, evolutionary pressures, or a combination of both. Because the basic organization of sensory systems is widely shared across species, the sounds designed to attract conspecifics, such as a pleasant birdsong, may also appeal to other species, including humans – a theory that Charles Darwin called “a taste for the beautiful.” However, the idea that humans share similar aesthetic preferences for sounds with other animals has not been rigorously tested.
Logan James and colleagues conducted a global citizen-science experiment in which 4,196 human participants evaluated 110 pairs of animal sounds recorded from 16 species. In each pair, previous studies had already established which sound animals themselves preferred. Participants chose which of the two paired sounds they liked more, allowing the authors to compare human acoustic preferences with animals’. James et al. found that humans share certain acoustic preferences with a wide range of animals, including insects, frogs, birds, and other mammals. Overall, humans were more likely than chance to prefer the same sounds that animals themselves favor, and this agreement strengthened when animals showed clearer preferences. Moreover, humans tended to choose animal-preferred sounds more quickly and repeatedly. Together, these findings suggest a modest but consistent overlap between human aesthetic judgments and the signals animals use in mate choice. According to the authors, preferences likely reflect complex combinations of cues rather than any single property such as pitch, loudness, or duration. However, humans showed one notable tendency – they favored lower-pitched sounds. The findings also suggest neither expertise with animal sounds nor musical training increased agreement with animals’ preferences, though individuals who reported listening to more music daily showed slightly greater alignment, possibly due to enhanced auditory attention and discrimination.