Ants Outperform Humans in Group Decision-Making Challenge

A Weizmann Institute study led by Prof. Ofer Feinerman pitted ants and humans against each other in a maze navigation experiment designed to test group cooperation. While humans excelled individually, ant groups demonstrated superior collaborative problem-solving, outperforming human groups in several scenarios. The study highlights the ants’ collective memory and calculated teamwork, contrasting with human groups that often relied on short-term strategies and failed to leverage the "wisdom of the crowd." These findings, published in PNAS, provide new insights into the dynamics of group decision-making and the evolutionary advantages of cooperation.

Among people with dialysis-dependent kidney failure, a form of psychological therapy called pain coping skills training reduced how much pain got in the way of their daily lives, also known as pain interference. The clinical trial, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), found that training people on how to manage pain reduced the extent to which pain affected their work and social activities, mood, and relationships. The pain coping skills training, which was adapted for people undergoing long-term dialysis, also improved other effects of pain, including the intensity of pain, depression, anxiety, and quality of life. Pain coping skills training is an approach widely used for chronic pain, but it had not previously been tested for people treated with dialysis.

Conversational AI agents may become attuned to covertly influence your intentions, creating a new commercial frontier that researchers call the “intention economy”. They say that, left unchecked, this emerging marketplace raises concern about social manipulation on a massive scale.