your science briefing for 02.19.2025

A philosopher wants to make AI feel pain and fear, a black hole jet 200,000 light years across lights up the early universe, why lung cancer cases keep rising, and more...

From the folder of potentially terrible ideas comes a philosopher’s idea that if we ever wanted to make a truly intelligent AI system, we’d need to teach it how to feel pain, as well as joy. Essentially, this is a rehash of the embodiment theory — the idea that any artificial sentience has to start with having a body to interact with the world — with a potentially grim and very dangerous twist. An AI which understands and experiences emotion is one of the main characters in the classic dystopian sci-fi short I Nave No Mouth And I Must Scream for a reason… (Big Think)

No, your teenagers’ screens aren’t necessarily going to give them depression, anxiety, and self-esteem issues. While those claims are widespread, the science behind them is actually very shaky and misleading. But teens are spending too much time behind a screen or talking to chatbots — which pose their own threats — rather than socializing with friends and neither they or their parents are happy about it, looking for more and better ways to hang out and connect… (Axios)

Supermassive black holes can throw a tantrum on intergalactic scales, and it seems they’ve been able to do it since the dawn of the known universe. One black hole with the poetic moniker J1601+3102 has even set a record for the biggest jet of plasma in the early days of the cosmos. Roughly 11 billion years ago, it carved out an area over 200,000 light years across with its equivalent of a belch in death ray form. How big is that exactly? You would have line up two of our home galaxies end to end to match its scale, although I wouldn’t recommend it. You know, because of the deadly radiation that would sterilize entire solar systems… (LiveScience)

While, unfortunately, there are plenty of people who use terms like “woke” and “DEI” because they’re too scared to use the racial slur they want and substitute them as a less socially risky pejorative, it turns out far more Americans may support DEI efforts than not. Up to 82% of participants in a new study agreed that the country’s racial diversity is a net positive. While there’s a lot more nuance to it than that, the results suggest that outright racists and segregationists are a minority, but they’re given an outsize platform, too much attention, and little pushback… (PsyPost)

The number of smokers across the world is steadily dropping, at least relative to the global population. And yet, rates of lung cancer are exploding, with many diagnosed patients having never so much as had a cigarette and living with other non-smokers. What could possibly be happening? The answer is both simple and frustrating. Our pollution from fossil fuel derived chemicals appears to be one of the biggest culprits by far, especially in China and Southeast Asia… (ScienceAlert)