Why do people’s pupils dilate when they’re surprised?

“Pupil dilation signals a spike in arousal, and our findings support the idea that these rapid fluctuations in arousal are doing something useful in the brain,” said study author Matt Nassar, an associate professor of neuroscience and of cognitive and psychological sciences at Brown. “They’re enabling us to deal with a world that often changes from one context to another context.” Corrie Pikul, News from Brown

Chasing new skills

But since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, more than 600,000 US tech workers have lost their jobs, according to the tech layoff tracker Layoff.fyi. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for computer science graduates rose to 7% in 2024, up from 6.1% the previous year, and their underemployment rate was more than 19%, data from the New York Fed shows. US tech job postings on Indeed also dropped 36% from 2020 to 2025.

Experts are unsure what’s next for software engineers, but they agree on one thing: coding skills may be losing value, but the ability to evaluate AI-written code is becoming more important. Varsha Bansal, The Guardian

Trying Dry January?

More drinkers have been saying cheers to a booze-free January, according to a new study, and that choice might come with real health benefits and ultimately help some people cut back for good.

Published in Alcohol and Alcoholism, the review by researchers from Brown University’s School of Public Health and Warren Alpert Medical School analyzed 16 other studies, with more than 150,000 total participants, that specifically mentioned the term “Dry January.” The team examined who takes part in the month-long alcohol-free challenge, how they are affected and what factors help people succeed. The study also identified how the campaign might expand and improve participation.

Researchers found that even a temporary pause in drinking can lead to meaningful physical and psychological improvements. Participants who cut out alcohol completely for the month reported improved sleep, better mood, weight loss, and healthier liver function and blood pressure. Corrie Pikul, News from Brown 

How A Woodpecker Pecks Wood

If you’ve heard the hammering of a woodpecker in the woods, you might have wondered how the birds can be so forceful. What does it take to whack your head against a tree repeatedly, hard enough to drill a hole? A team of researchers wondered that too and set out to investigate, by putting tiny muscle monitors on eight downy woodpeckers and recording them with high-speed video as they pecked away in the lab. Science Friday

A team of researchers at Brown has pecked away at the mysterious force of woodpeckers, revealing how the birds combine breathing and whole-body coordination to drill into trees with extraordinary force. “I think one of the most stunning things that we found in this study was that… they’re engaging everything from head and neck muscles, which you might expect, all the way down to muscles in their tail and hips as they push forward during these strikes,” said lead author Nicholas Antonson, a postdoctoral research fellow in ecology, evolution and organismal biology at Brown. 

finiamo l'anno con notizie curiose 

A Brief History of U.S. Research Funding

Before World War II, the federal government didn’t fund research. But after scientists with the Manhattan Project helped win the war, the U.S. was convinced that university research was a great national investment. Until now. A look back at how we got here. Will Bunch, Brown Alumni Magazine

Political extremists brains

When people with extreme political views see politically charged content, their brains process the information in the same way — even when their views are at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum.

That’s according to a new study led by psychological and cognitive researchers and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research provides psychological evidence for the theory of horseshoe politics, which holds that the views of people at the far left and far right of the political spectrum resemble each other more closely than they do people with moderate views. Corrie Pikul, News from Brown

ah, ah, ah! Lo immaginavo... 

Using AI in the classroom

This July, Michael Littman, a professor of computer science at Brown University, started a new role on campus as the University’s first associate provost for artificial intelligence. Littman’s charge includes supporting AI-related research, expanding opportunities for students to engage with AI across a diverse array of disciplines and advising operational units on AI use and working with external entities to maximize the impact of Brown's AI research.

Q: What about AI in research? What kinds of things are you thinking about there?

There are two broad categories here. There's research on AI specifically — how to make it work better, how to use it responsibly, etc. Then there's research that’s not on AI per se, but that AI can help to support. Brown University

e molto altro, un articolo interessante! 

Science meets art in Brown engineering course

Using the scientific principles behind fluid mechanics, students in a School of Engineering course produced stunning imagery brought to life via high-speed photography.

Conducting the experiment as part of Engineering 0350: Art Fluid Engineering, the students’ goal was to capture stunning imagery, using high-speed photography, of the different ways liquids can splash. The end product is meant to show how the work of scientists and engineers, and the fundamental laws and principles they rely on, can also be applied to artistic creation. News from Brown

Branching out

Trees communicate with each other, store memories and respond to attacks. They have a profoundly positive effect on our emotions … but can we know how they feel about us? Peter Wohlleben, The Guardian. Un articolo molto interessante per chi è amante delle piante e che, come me, pensa o si illude di provare empatia per esse.

Dizionari: Victorian attempts to veil the meanings of crude ancient Greek words are set to be brushed away by a new dictionary 23 years in the making. It is the first to take a fresh look at the language in almost 200 years and promises to “spare no blushes” for today’s classics students. The completed Cambridge Greek Lexicon, which is being published by Cambridge University Press, runs to two volumes and features around 37,000 Greek words, drawn from 90 authors and set out across 1,500 pages. Alison Flood, The Guardian

The Light Ages

The Light Ages, by Seb Falk (Norton). The figure at the heart of this exploration of medieval astronomers, philosophers, and physicians is John of Westwyk, a brilliant fourteenth-century Benedictine monk who created an equatorium, a kind of analog computer for determining the positions of the planets. As John passes in and out of the historical record, Falk provides an expansive survey of Eastern polymaths, squabbling theorists, political schemers, and optimistic overreachers. Those dreamers can be the most beguiling: the eleventh-century monk Eilmer of Malmesbury leaped from an abbey tower with wings attached to his hands and feet, flying two hundred metres before plunging to earth. Falk, always generous, applauds him for having “piloted an experimental glider, not wholly without success.” The New Yorker

L'importanza degli studi umanistici

 As a participant in the Graduate School’s first Summer Proctorship Program, religious studies Ph.D. student Tara Dhaliwal used her research and writing skills to introduce the work of Brown scientists to industry partners. Brown

Invisibility

Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen (Chicago), by the British science writer Philip Ball. A former editor of Nature and the author of nineteen previous books (he should write about that superpower), Ball leads us on a very fun, largely chronological journey through invisibility, beginning with myth and early magicians, ending with quantum physics, and stopping along the way at Newton, Leibniz, microscopy, photography, spiritualism, B movies, and science fiction. He is lucid and interesting on every topic he touches, from the ghost in “Hamlet” to those unseen extra dimensions posited by string theory. But he is more a tour guide than a theorist, and he never entirely succeeds at pulling the category together, or illuminating our own ambivalent relationship to the prospect of becoming invisible. Kathryn Schulz, newyorker.

Il mistero delle mappe medioevali

Come facevano a essere così accurate? Un cartografo cerca nella matematica un metodo per spiegarlo. "That first portolan mapmaker also created an enormous puzzle for historians to come, because he left behind few hints of his method: no rough drafts, no sketches, no descriptions of his work. “Even with all the information he had — every sailor’s notebook, every description in every journal — I wouldn’t know how to make the map he made,” says John Hessler, a specialist in modern cartography at the Library of Congress.

But Hessler has approached the question using a tool that is foreign to most historians: mathematics. By systematically analyzing the discrepancies between the portolan charts and modern ones, Hessler has begun to trace the mapmaker’s tracks within the maps themselves". Julie Rehmeyer, discovermagazine.

McCulloch e Pitts

Una storia molto interessante, quella dell'incontro e della collaborazione di McCulloch e Pitts, il primo uno dei fondatori delle neuroscienze e il secondo un matematico. Il primo un intellettuale proveniente da una ricca famiglia della East Coast, il secondo una sorta di barbone senza un'istruzione istituzionale.
"McCulloch explained to Pitts that he was trying to model the brain with a Leibnizian logical calculus. He had been inspired by the Principia, in which Russell and Whitehead tried to show that all of mathematics could be built from the ground up using basic, indisputable logic. Their building block was the proposition—the simplest possible statement, either true or false. From there, they employed the fundamental operations of logic, like the conjunction (“and”), disjunction (“or”), and negation (“not”), to link propositions into increasingly complicated networks. From these simple propositions, they derived the full complexity of modern mathematics". Amanda Gefter, nautilus.

Absolute English

Science once communicated in a polyglot of tongues, but now English rules alone. How did this happen – and at what cost?

"... contemporary science is monoglot: everyone uses English almost to the exclusion of other languages. A century ago, the majority of researchers in Western science knew at least some English, but they also read, wrote and spoke in French and German, and sometimes in other ‘minor’ languages, such as the newly emergent Russian or the rapidly fading Italian". Michael D Gordin, aeon.

Verrua Savoia sul NYT

Qualche giorno fa il NYT ha dedicato un lungo articolo a Verrua Savoia, il villaggio piemontese (provincia di Torino) più cablato d'Italia.

"After all, roughly a third of Italians have never used the Internet, giving the country one of the lowest rates of usage in Europe. Residents can recall providers laughing over the phone at their request for an Internet hookup, or the perplexed look of technicians upon arriving in Verrua Savoia, where just 1,500 residents live in dozens of small settlements spread over nearly 20 miles of valleys and steep hillsides in northern Italy.

Even so, some here believed they had the right to join the digital world, to pay their bills, do their banking or make a doctor’s appointment online.

One was Daniele Trinchero, a professor at the nearby Polytechnic University of Turin, who helped set up a nonprofit association that started last week and that offers fellow citizens what both the state and telecommunications companies have so far failed to deliver. The group may be the first of its kind in Italy". Gaia Pianigiani, nyt.

Nuovi libri sulla matematica

Nuovi libri sulla matematica di Jordan Ellenberg, David J. Hand, Michael Blastland e David Spiegelhalter, Amir Alexander, e Alex Bellos. "Every math teacher cringes at the inevitable question from students: “When am I ever going to use this?” Ellenberg, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin, admits that even though we’ll never need to compute long lists of integrals in our daily lives, we still need math. It’s “a science of not being wrong about things,” he writes, and it gives us tools to enhance our reasoning, which is prone to false assumptions and cognitive biases". nytbooks.

Infisitesimal

Amir Alexander, Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux): The paradoxical idea of infinitesimal quantities preoccupied ancient Greek mathematicians, especially Archimedes, who used the concept to calculate volumes of circles, cylinders, and spheres. But the mathematical mysteries the idea presented were largely ignored until the fifteen-hundreds, when the problem of the infinitesimal became a source of philosophical dispute. In his new book, Alexander, a professor of history at U.C.L.A., explains how the mathematical debate was a battle over differing visions for modern Europe, between those who sought to protect the status quo and those who embraced progress and reform. newyorker.

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets è il titolo di un libro di Simon Singh (Bloomsbury), un fisico laureato a Cambridge che ora si occupa di divulgazione scientifica. Qui sostiene che i Simpson siano pieni di allusioni matematiche. "But "the truth", according to Singh, "is that many of the writers of The Simpsons are deeply in love with numbers, and their ultimate desire is to drip-feed morsels of mathematics into the subconscious minds of viewers". "Ultimate desire" may be pushing it, but as Singh demonstrates in his lively book, there's no shortage of mathematical jokes and references scattered through the show. Whether or not the writers of The Simpsons are covertly using a cartoon to foist mathematical concepts on the unwary, Singh without question is". guardian.

Perché così poche donne nelle facoltà scientifiche?

Chiara Daraio, prof. di areonautica  a Pasadena

Un articolo interessante sulla scarsità di donne nelle facoltà scientifiche - fisica e matematica soprattutto - nelle grandi università americane. Un articolo pieno di dati statistici e testimonianze, come sempre, ma che sembra non cogliere del tutto il punto.  
Mi sembra che in Europa - e anche in Italia, un paese apparentemente assai più sessista degli USA - le cose vadano un po' diversamente. Magari le donne non riescono a trovare lavoro (ma neppure gli uomini), ma le facoltà scientifiche ora sono piene di donne.
"Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts...." Eileen Pollack, nyt.