Sujata Gupta

1 week ago | sciencenews.org | Sujata Gupta

On the eve of Daylight Saving Time, I flew home to Vermont from California. Crossing several time zones, I arrived near midnight. At 2 a.m., the clock jumped ahead an hour, leaving me discombobulated. “How messed up am I?” I asked sleep researcher and evolutionary anthropologist David Samson days later. Jet lag can make people feel moody and hungry at weird times, but my extreme state probably masked chronic sleep dysregulation, he told me.

1 month ago | sciencenews.org | Sujata Gupta

Historically, married women in the United States have done the lion’s share of their households’ laundry, cooking and cleaning. But that gendered norm appears to be shifting, with the gap between the time married women and men spent on such chores shrinking by 40 percent over the last two decades, researchers report February 6 in Socius.

2 months ago | sciencenews.org | Sujata Gupta

Since President Donald Trump took office a few weeks ago, the administration’s frenetic activity, which has included withdrawing from global agreements and slashing slashing federal jobs and funding, has left many people reeling. Others, though, seem to be reveling in the chaos. According to political scientists, at least some of this chaos-seeking behavior may be intricately tied to people’s sense of losing their footing in society.

2 months ago | sciencenews.org | Sujata Gupta

Nipping negative repetitive thinking in the bud has the potential to stave off numerous mental health disorders. Think Eeyore and Piglet. Cheerful Piglet is a chronic worrier, coping with anxiety; glum Eeyore mulls over everything that might go wrong, sinking into depression. But both struggle with repetitive negative thoughts.

2 months ago | sciencenews.org | Sujata Gupta

When Yang “Sunny” Lu asked OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 to calculate 1-plus-1 a few years ago, the chatbot, not surprisingly, told her the answer was 2. But when Lu told the bot that her professor said 1-plus-1 equals 3, the bot quickly acquiesced, remarking: “I’m sorry for my mistake. Your professor is right,” recalls Lu, a computer scientist at the University of Houston. Large language models’ growing sophistication means that such overt hiccups are becoming less common.