That's Interesting
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Why loneliness is bad for your health
14th April, 2024A lack of social interaction is linked to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia and more. Researchers are unpicking how the brain mediates these effects.
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Memories are made by breaking DNA — and fixing it
10th April, 2024When a long-term memory forms, some brain cells experience a rush of electrical activity so strong that it snaps their DNA. Then, an inflammatory response kicks in, repairing this damage and helping to cement the memory, a study in mice shows.
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Goethe’s Theory of Colors: The 1810 Treatise That Inspired Kandinsky & Early Abstract Painting
07th April, 2024Goethe’s book on color, Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), written in 1810, disputed the Newtonian view of the subject and formulated a psychological and philosophical account of the way we actually experience color as a phenomenon.
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OpenVertebrate Presents a Massive Database of 13,000 3D Scans of Vertebrate Specimens
25th March, 2024From The Florida Museum of Natural History comes the openVertebrate project, a new initiative to “provide free, digital 3D vertebrate anatomy models and data to researchers, educators, students and the public.”
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Two Broods of More Than a Trillion Cicadas Will Emerge in the U.S. This Year
04th March, 2024More than a trillion cicadas will be coming to the U.S. in an event that has not happened since Thomas Jefferson was U.S. president in 1803. Two adjacent broods of the red-eyed flying cicadas will emerge from the ground in April, and residents in the Midwest and Southeast should brace themselves for a season of high-pitched buzzing. 2024 will mark the first time in more than 200 years that Brood XIX, which arrives every 13 years, and Brood XIII, which arrives every 17 years, will emerge at the same time. The next co-emergence of these broods won’t happen for another 221 years.
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The new car batteries that could power the electric vehicle revolution
23rd February, 2024Researchers are experimenting with different designs that could lower costs, extend vehicle ranges and offer other improvements.
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What Plants Hear
21st February, 2024They sense the buzzing sounds of pollinators, the vibrations of the wind.
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Counterproductive Sustainable Investing: The Impact Elasticity of Brown and Green Firms
11th January, 2024The article develops a new measure of impact elasticity, defined as a firm’s change in environmental impact due to a change in its cost of capital. It shows empirically that a reduction in financing costs for firms that are already green leads to small improvements in impact at best. In contrast, increasing financing costs for brown firms leads to large negative changes in firm impact. Thus, sustainable investing that directs capital away from brown firms and toward green firms may be counterproductive, in that it makes brown firms more brown without making green firms more green.
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From Transcripts to Insights: Uncovering Corporate Risks Using Generative AI
19th November, 2023This article explores the value of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, in helping investors uncover dimensions of corporate risk by developing and validating firm-level measures of risk exposure to political, climate, and AI-related risks. Using the GPT 3.5 model to generate risk summaries and assessments from the context provided by earnings call transcripts, it shows that GPT-based measures possess significant information content and outperform the existing risk measures in predicting (abnormal) firm-level volatility and firms’ choices such as investment and innovation.
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A Review of Electric Vehicle Consumer Subsidies in Canada
06th November, 2023A look at EV purchase subsidies in Canada, which have been introduced to accelerate market uptake of these vehicles as part of governments’ efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that contribute to climate change. Transportation accounts for almost one-quarter of Canada’s total GHG emissions, so it is not surprising that Canadian policymakers are focusing on emissions from this sector.
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