Psychology and other “helping professions” such as counselling and social work are often regarded as quintessentially human domains. Unlike workers in manual or routine jobs, psychologists generally see no threat to their career from advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Economists largely agree. One of the most wide-ranging and influential surveys of the future of employment, by Oxford economists Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, rated the probability that psychology could be automated in the near future at a mere 0.43%. This work was initially carried out in 2013 and expanded upon in 2019.

We are behavourial scientists studying organisational behaviour, and one of us (Ben Morrison) is also a registered psychologist. Our analysis over the past four years shows the idea psychology cannot be automated is now out of date.

Psychology already makes use of many automated tools, and even without significant advances in AI we foresee significant impacts in the very near future.

My husband and I (as well as our daughter, “Chloe”) moved to a new state about a year and a half ago. We live in an extremely White suburb that is surrounded by a large, non-White city. We wanted to live in the city, but the crime rate caused us to look elsewhere. As a result, everyone in our neighborhood is White. There are eight other children that live in our neighborhood that are around my daughter’s age (she’s 7). The first few months were great, and she was constantly going over to other kids’ houses to play or inviting them here. She was a little socially behind in our last town, so I was happy she had made friends. But then I started to notice that her friends were terribly racist, and after inviting the kids’ parents over for dinner … the parents are racist too. Not just microaggressions or an off-color joke (which would be bad enough by itself), but just full-on, blatant racism. Even my husband, who is from a small town that still has Klan activity, was shocked and appalled.

I don’t want my daughter spending time with these children. When the pandemic happened, we didn’t have to worry about it too much because no one was seeing anyone. But the neighborhood kids have started spending time together again (at a distance), and my daughter has been asking to go outside and play. The kids have also come and knocked on the door a few times asking for my daughter, but I made up an excuse. On the one hand, I don’t want to deprive my daughter of friends (she goes to an extremely small magnet school and isn’t really fitting in there, not to mention her classmates live 30-plus minutes away). On the other hand, I don’t want her to befriend racists! My daughter recently told me she had been feeling left out. What do I do?

—Not Raising a Racist

We knew the long quarantine was making us all crabby, but this is extreme: People now feel fully betrayed by the long history of crabification (technically, “carcinization”) of different species over time. That means groups of crustaceans have evolved into crabs in five completely different contexts, giving rise to a meme that the long arc of history truly bends toward the crab.

So how does carcinization happen? Well, that part is pretty simple. Animals that live in similar habitats face obstacles that can shuttle them all toward the same evolutionary advantages. Britannica cites the marsupials as a key example, where despite having one critical difference from their “placental” counterparts in other parts of the world, the marsupials often correspond very closely to these other animals.

Animals can evolve separately but end up evolving toward other species, too, or even spontaneously evolve the same characteristics in totally separate groups. Birds and bats can both fly using mechanical wings. Birds and mammals are both warmblooded, but both evolved from groups that were not.

A team of researchers at Tsinghua University in China have created a liquid metal material that is so light, it can float on water.

The researchers are hoping the extremely light material could be used to construct lightweight exoskeletons and shape-shifting “Terminator 2“-style robots, New Scientist reports.

The researchers created a mixture of the soft metals gallium and indium, which had a melting point of just 15.7 Celsius (60.3 Fahrenheit). To make it float, the team gently stirred microscopic beads of glass, filled with air, into the liquid.

Getting married is like voluntarily committing oneself to ride a tandem bike forever with no real destination. When one person gets tired, the other has to pedal harder or the entire operation collapses, and most divorce proceedings are just both partners yelling that if the other had pedaled hard enough then the bike would still be moving. Perhaps the appeal of living apart together (LAT) is avoiding this pressure for married couples to constantly synch up and operate in tandem rather than operating as separate entities that come together when it suits. LAT seems like an ideal solution for many of the problems that arise over the course of a marriage, affording the opportunity to be responsible for one’s own bike without having any reason to critique anyone else’s peddling.

First class isn't what it used to be, at least according to frequent airline passengers like Bonnie Friedman. She's been flying in the front of the plane for years and has witnessed the slow and sad decline of premium service.

"It was never fabulous," says Friedman, a communication consultant who lives on Maui. "But in the last three or four years, it has most definitely lost what little luster it had. The planes are cheaply made, the seats are smaller, the bathrooms almost too small to get into — and I’m a small person."

In first class. Yes, first class.

Friedman, like a lot of other air travelers, has noticed a marked decline in premium service. Seats have shrunk. Leg rests vanished. The food is barely edible, and the service is unacceptable.

And let's be clear about what we mean by first class: We're talking about domestic flights and generally excluding the competitive transcontinental flights, where airlines still make a half-hearted attempt to put the "first" into first class.

Too much sugar is bad for your health — but the world’s most popular alternative might not be any better.

For decades, experts have questioned the safety of artificial sweetener aspartame — also known as NutraSweet — with some studies concluding that the sugar substitute can cause a host of health problems, from brain damage to cancer.

To put the issue to rest, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) conducted a closed-door review of available aspartame studies in 2013 and found it to be safe — but according to new research, that’s only because they threw out all the studies claiming otherwise.

Even the most ardent craft beer buff or wine connoisseur would have trouble arguing that alcohol doesn’t have its downsides — but that might not be the case for long.

For more than a decade, according to The Guardian, scientist David Nutt had been developing a synthetic alcohol substitute he calls Alcarelle. He claims his creation has the potential to allow drinkers to enjoy all the benefits of alcohol and none of the drawbacks — meaning it could bring an end to everything from hangovers to alcohol-related cancers.