By Dawn Branley-Bell, Chartered Psychologist & Associate Professor of Digital Health & Wellbeing, Northumbria University, Newcastle
A teenager joins an online video chat. Within seconds, artificial intelligence analyses their face and gives them a score out of ten for “attractiveness”. They are compared in real time with another user who scores higher and is declared the winner. The game is live-streamed, and the audience ridicule the loser in the chat.
This is one example from a growing number of websites and apps that rate people’s faces – sometimes comparing users, identifying supposed flaws or recommending ways to improve their score.…
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By Robert Muggah, Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow na Bosch Academy e Co-fundador, Instituto Igarapé; Princeton University
Latin America’s most powerful criminal groups have expanded beyond the drug trade – and have become more resilient as a result. That’s what my colleagues and I discovered while researching for a new study on the structural transformation of organized crime across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Criminal networks now draw revenue from illicit and legal sources alike. Many of them police neighborhoods and influence local politics. Others invest in legitimate businesses and exploit global…
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By Human Rights Watch
Click to expand Image Police in Paser regency charged Misran Toni, a farmer who protested the giant trucks used by a coal mining company because they caused potholes, traffic snarls, and serious accidents. On April 16, 2026, the Tanah Grogot district court acquitted him after he had spent 10 months in police detention. © 2026 Yulia Adiningsih Indonesia’s Supreme Court on August 5 upheld the acquittal of Misran Toni, an Indigenous Dayak farmer known as Imis, who was participating in a coal mining protest and charged with stabbing other protesters in East Kalimantan. The…
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By Tam Nguyen, Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Dayton
Computers break examples of human speech into small bits of sound, then put them together to sound like people do.
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By Jillian Turanovic, Professor of Sociology, Co-Director of the CU Center on Crime and Justice, University of Colorado Boulder
Melinda Tasca, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Texas at El Paso
The Adams County Jail, just north of Denver, does not allow in-person visits. Over the course of their incarceration, people detained there will never share a visiting room with their families and children, or even sit across from them behind a plexiglass barrier.
As in nearly all county jails across Colorado’s Front Range and a growing number of county jails…
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By Cody Pritchard, Doctoral Candidate of Education, University of Tennessee
Jeff Carpenter, Professor of Education, Elon University
Joshua Rosenberg, Assistant Professor of STEM Education, University of Tennessee
New research shows that YouTube is used not just as an occasional supplement, but as a staple of classroom instruction.
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By Daile Zhang, Assistant Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of North Dakota
Every year, an estimated 6,000 to 24,000 people are killed by lightning across the world, and many more are injured.
Obviously, there is a wide range in these numbers, and that’s due to the fact that these estimates are built on limited and incomplete information.
I’m a lightning researcher at the University of North Dakota. I study both the physics of lightning and its impact on people. The…
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By Joan Rose, Professor of Water Research; Director, Water Alliance, Michigan State University
US sewage treatment plants likely don’t get rid of all the disease-causing protozoa, and monitoring discharged wastewater for it is difficult.
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By Shayne A. P. Dahl, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, University of Calgary
People around the world are gathering in wilderness settings with the intention to initiate contact with UFOs using various techniques.
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By Jessica Mary Bradley, Senior Lecturer in Literacies and Language, University of Sheffield
Louise Atkinson, Artist Researcher, University of Leeds
Home is often imagined as a physical structure or a fixed point on a map, something stable that we can locate and return to. Yet our earliest experiences of home are rarely so concrete. They are shaped by memory, sensation and emotion, held in fragments of sound, smell, language and feeling.
One Song, a socially engaged arts project by London-based artist Kadir Karababa, is currently on show at The Art House, a creative hub of artist studios, galleries and community workshop…
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