AI productivity gains are 10%, not 10x

Preliminary data from our longitudinal AI impact study

Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die

Impacts of working from home on mental health tracked in study of 16,000 Australians

Working from home can positively impact the mental health of Australian men and women in different ways, according to a new study of more than 16,000 people. 

Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries - Nature Human Behaviour

Measuring rhythm priors in 39 participant groups from 15 countries, the authors find that properties of rhythm representations are common across cultures, while variation from place to place related to local musical traditions exists.

Microbial biotherapeutic metabolite alleviates liver injury by restoring hepatic lipid metabolism through PPARα across the gut-liver axis | mBio

Chronic liver diseases, including liver steatosis and fibrosis, are driven in part by dysregulation of PPARα and lipid metabolism. These diseases also generate gut barrier disruption and microbiome dysbiosis, leading to dysfunction of the gut-liver axis. ...

A look back at the Iberian power outage of April 28 - Akamai mPulse Developer Blog

What patterns do we see in RUM data during the April 28th power outage in Portugal and Spain?

Expanding RL with Verifiable Rewards Across Diverse Domains

Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown promising results in mathematical reasoning and coding tasks where well-structured reference answers are available. However, its applicability to broader domains remains underexplored. In this work, we study the extension of RLVR to more diverse domains such as medicine, chemistry, psychology, and economics. We observe high agreement in binary judgments across different large language models (LLMs) when objective reference answers exist, which challenges the necessity of large-scale annotation for training domain-specific reward models. To address the limitations of binary rewards when handling unstructured reference answers, we further incorporate model-based soft scoring into RLVR to improve its flexibility. Our experiments show that a distilled generative reward model can serve as an effective cross-domain verifier, providing reliable reward signals for RL without requiring domain-specific annotations. By fine-tuning a base 7B model using various RL algorithms against our reward model, we obtain policies that outperform state-of-the-art open-source aligned LLMs such as Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B by a large margin, across domains in free-form answer settings. This also strengthens RLVR's robustness and scalability, highlighting its potential for real-world applications with noisy or weak labels.

A study reveals that deciduous trees’ roots remain active in winter

Until now, it was believed that the roots, along with the rest of the tree, stopped their activity and ‘went to sleep’ during the winter, but curious research published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution shows that roots do not rest at any time and continue to grow.