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From ‘80s new wave to ‘90s grunge to the latest pop single, music has changed a lot over the decades. Those changes have come not only in terms of sound, though; lyrics have also evolved as time has passed.

So what has changed about the lyrics we can’t get out of our heads? After analyzing 12,000 English-language pop, rock, rap, R&B, and country songs released between 1970 and 2020, researcher Eva Zangerle of Innsbruck University and her team have found that lyrics have been getting simpler and more repetitive over time. This trend is especially evident in rap and rock, but it applies to other genres as well. Another thing Zangerle’s team discovered is that lyrics tend to be more personal and emotionally charged now than they were over 50 years ago.

Know the words…

“Just as literature can be considered a portrayal of society, lyrics also provide a reflection of a society’s shifting norms, emotions, and values over time,” the researchers wrote in a study recently published in Scientific Reports.

Enlarge / Harvard's got a lawsuit on its hands. (credit: Glowimages)

Accusations of research misconduct often trigger extensive investigations, typically performed by the institution where the misconduct allegedly took place. These investigations are internal employment matters, and false accusations have the potential to needlessly wreck someone's career. As a result, most of these investigations are kept completely confidential, even after their completion.

But all the details of a misconduct investigation performed by Harvard University became public this week through an unusual route. The professor who had been accused of misconduct, Francesca Gino, had filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit, targeting both Harvard and a team of external researchers who had accused her of misconduct. Harvard submitted its investigator's report as part of its attempt to have part of the suit dismissed, and the judge overseeing the case made it public.

We covered one of the studies at issue at the time of its publication. It has since been retracted, and we'll be updating our original coverage accordingly.

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By now, everyone has heard of millennials’ supposed devotion to avocado toast, but is it true that millennials live for brunch more than work? Could Gen Z be the laziest generation of all? These are just some of the stereotypes associated with what generations we are born into, but there may be less to these stereotypes than many people think.

Sociologist Martin Schröder, a professor at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, wanted to find out if some birth cohorts consider work and career more important than others do. Tracking how answers changed over time produced some unexpected results.

Regardless of what generation someone belongs to, the importance of work actually depends on a combination of what year it was and what age that person was at the time of being surveyed. Schröder’s findings showed that younger individuals (regardless of what generation they’re from) tend to find work less important and that the importance of work has been going down over time.

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ChatGPT, arguably the most famous chatbot ever, learned its sometimes human-like conversational skills by parsing through absurd amounts of text data—millions of books, articles, Wikipedia pages, and everything else its creators could find by crawling around the Internet.

But what if an advanced AI could learn the way a little kid does, without reading 80 million books or looking at 97 million cats? Just making its first baby steps exploring an amazing new world under the patient guidance of mom and dad. A team of New York University researchers just gave it a shot, and it kind of worked.

Childhood memories

“The big thing this project speaks to is this classic debate on nurture versus nature. What is built into the child and what can be acquired through experience out in the world?” says Wai Keen Vong, a researcher at the NYU Center for Data Science. To find out, Vong and his team pushed an AI algorithm through the closest possible equivalent of early human childhood. They did this by feeding it a database called SAYCam-S, which is filled with first-person video footage taken by a camera strapped to a baby named Sam, recorded while Sam was doing usual baby things between the sixth and 25 ^th month of his life.

What draws us to choose romantic partners? A sweeping new meta-analysis suggests we gravitate toward certain shared traits. (credit: Muramasa )

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: a broad meta-analysis spanning over a century of studies finds that opposites don't really attract when it comes to choosing a mate.

We've all heard the common folk wisdom that when it comes to forming romantic partnerships, opposites attract. Researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, contend that this proverbial wisdom is largely false, based on the findings of their sweeping September study , published in the journal Nature Human Behavior. The saying, "birds of a feather flock together," is a more apt summation of how we choose our partners.

“These findings suggest that even in situations where we feel like we have a choice about our relationships, there may be mechanisms happening behind the scenes of which we aren't fully aware,” said co-author Tanya Horwitz , a psychology and neuroscience graduate student at UCB. “We’re hoping people can use this data to do their own analyses and learn more about how and why people end up in the relationships they do.”

Enlarge / Shake, shake, shake: this adorable young child would love to guess what he's getting for Christmas this year. (credit: Johns Hopkins University)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: New research shows it’s incredibly easy for people watching others shake boxes to tell what they’re up to.

Christmas Day is a time for opening presents and finally ending the suspense of what one is receiving this year, but chances are some of us may have already guessed what's under the wrapping—perhaps by strategically shaking the boxes for clues about its contents. According to a November paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, if someone happened to see you shaking a wrapped gift, they would be able to tell from those motions what you were trying to learn by doing so.

“There are few things more delightful than seeing a child’s eyes light up as they pick up a present and wonder what might be inside,” said co-author Chaz Firestone of Johns Hopkins University, who studies how vision and thought interact. “What our work shows is that your mind is able to track the information they are seeking. Just as they might be able to tell what’s inside the box by shaking it around, you can tell what they are trying to figure out when they shake it.” Christmas presents are "the perfect real-life example of our experiment.”

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Political polarization in the US has become a major issue, as Republicans and Democrats increasingly inhabit separate realities on topics as diverse as election results and infectious diseases. An actual separation seems to underly some of these differences, as members of the two parties tend to live in relatively homogeneous communities, cluster together on social media, and rely on completely different news sources.

That's not a recipe for a functional society, and lots of work has gone into exploring the impact of polarization, as well as possible means of reducing it. Now, a team of researchers has tested whether social media can potentially help the situation by getting people with opposite political leanings talking to each other about controversial topics. While this significantly reduced polarization, it appeared to be more effective for Republican participants.

Anonymity is key

The researchers zeroed in on two concepts to design their approach. The first is the idea that simply getting people to communicate across the political divide might reduce the sense that at least some of their opponents aren't as extreme as they're often made out to be. The second is that anonymity would allow people to focus on the content of their discussion, rather than worrying about whether what they were saying could be traced back to them.

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There is a reason countless songs about loneliness exist. Many are relatable, since feeling alone is often part of being human. But a particular song or experience that resonates with one lonely person may mean nothing to someone else who feels isolated and misunderstood.

Human beings are social creatures. Those who feel left out often experience loneliness. To investigate what goes on in the brains of lonely people, a team of researchers at UCLA conducted noninvasive brain scans on subjects and found something surprising. The scans revealed that non-lonely individuals were all found to have a similar way of processing the world around them. Lonely people not only interpret things differently from their non-lonely peers, but they even see them differently from each other.

“Our results suggest that lonely people process the world idiosyncratically, which may contribute to the reduced sense of being understood that often accompanies loneliness,” the research team, led by psychologist Elisa Baek of USC Dornsife, said in a study recently published in Psychological Science.

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Many Americans have been shocked by the frequency with which people who claim to love our democracy have supported blatantly undemocratic efforts to limit people's ability to vote or to selectively discard votes already cast. Unfortunately, this sort of democratic backsliding is far from a US-specific problem. Despite widespread support for democracy in countries like Venezuela and Hungary, people have turned out in large numbers to vote for autocrats.

A new study performed in the US suggests at least one explanation for the problem: People across the political spectrum appear to believe their political opponents are likely to take anti-democratic action if given the opportunity. And the strength of this belief correlates with a slightly increased willingness to take those actions first.

Nobody says they like this stuff

The finding, from a University of California, Berkeley-Massachusetts Institute of Technology collaboration, is based on demographically representative survey populations, which were asked about several potential anti-democratic actions. For example, those surveyed were asked if they agreed with reducing the number of voting facilities in towns that support the opposing party. Similar questions got at things like banning rallies, limiting freedom of expression, ignoring court rulings, or resorting to violence. After being asked for their own opinions, people were then asked whether they thought their political opponents supported these anti-democratic approaches.