New research argues that interacting with robots displaying human-like behaviors can cause people to adopt robot-like traits or ‘robotoid humanness.’

Nature provides resources to society, and the diversity of species is expected to underpin human economies. So why then are the poorest countries also those that are are richest in wildlife and contain a high number of different species? According to new research, the reason is that colonial exploitation of that biodiversity by now-rich countries created poverty legacies that still persist today.

The research team, from Trinity College Dublin, University of Bern, Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology, and the Wyss Academy for Nature, assessed datasets from 168 countries, which included World Bank poverty statistics, biodiversity records, governance indicators, colonial history, and protected-area coverage. The headline finding was that the regions most targeted by colonial powers were generally those richest in biodiversity, which has contributed to the modern structures of poverty.

To what extent does the allocation of aid for combating disease correspond to disease burden? LMU researchers have developed a machine learning pipeline that helps uncover relative discrepancies in aid distribution.

The study explores the relationship between human development and environmental factors in 22 Arab countries. The researchers utilized data from the Human Development Report (HDR) 2025 and performed a Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and hierarchical clustering to identify trends and patterns between six variables: life expectancy, expected and mean years of schooling, income per capita, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions as well as material footprint per capita.