News of the Woo 2

Another collection of strange and interesting discoveries: how messages spread through the grapvine in the jungle canopy, tiny robots made of flesh, are whales self-aware . . . is everything? Find out!

Transcript

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Hey folks, I'm back with another episode of The Rough Draft. This is Anthony Alvarado, and we're gonna do another news of the Woo segment because I thought it was pretty fun last time. Um, so this is a short rundown of strange and unusual and just kind of cool news that's crossed my desk in the last week or two. And uh let's get into it. First of all, we're covering psychology. Researchers have found that uh new research, and this is all very cutting-edge research, like I'm only reporting on stuff that's been found out in the past year. So researchers are saying that people who openly admit the limits of what they know are judged as more credible, more trustable, more believable, not less than people who try to act like they know everything. And uh yeah, so people that bluff out and are just kind of like trying to fake it. Researchers are saying that they're they wind up being less trusted over time. Confidence theater is a bad trade. Some of the most persuasive and charismatic things that you can say are actually I'm not sure. That's from the Journal of Positive Psychology. And from uh evolutionary psychology, the Parenthood Paradox. A 2026 study asked whether having kids makes you happier, day-to-day happiness, it does not. The change is basically flat. Having children makes you neither more or less happy. However, parents reported deeper meaning in life, mothers especially. Researchers are calling this the neutrality paradox because evolution would predict that uh having children would be joyful, would move the needle towards more highs, maybe more um ups and downs. However, the research really doesn't support that, doesn't find that. And in other news, why nature works on everyone, a new study has found that spending more time in nature reliably lifts life satisfaction. And the twist, you may have heard that. I mean, I I feel like I've been hearing that information uh for a while. The twist is that the new study is saying that it it matters because um it nudges up your own self-compassion and body appreciation. Uh people who spend time in nature feel more comfortable being themselves and being compassionate for themselves, which is pretty interesting. So, this is new research claiming that the reason that being around a bunch of trees and in nature, uh the reason that's good for you basically has to do with your empathy for yourself, which is important, obviously. Now, in uh let's move into AI, and uh there's always a lot of kind of new weird stuff going on with AI lately because it's uh a new technology. Anthropic researchers, those are the ones behind Claude, they ran a strange experiment where they're able to isolate the internal signature of a concept and inject it into a model's mind. And when they asked the model if it had noticed anything, sometimes it did, flagging and naming the planted thought before it leaked into the actual reply. So this is pretty trippy and interesting. They're researchers are uh injecting ideas into these AIs, and then the AI is able to tell when the idea isn't its own. I don't know, that sounds pretty sci-fi, if you ask me. But it's also researchers are saying it's a form of introspection. It's the system is able to catch an idea in the act, and uh it doesn't prove that uh there's consciousness happening, but it does prove that this machine has some things that is um you might call introspection. Yeah. And in the field of robotics, this one really tripped me out. There's a fast-growing field of robotics that are not made from motors and gears, but made out of living muscle tissue that has been cultured in uh in cells, cultured in labs. And the tissue, what is it? It's from mice and mostly, and and they grow it in a lab, and they're building little tiny robots out of these, as in um like the size of like a gummy bear. And so far, I don't think they they're building anything um in particular, but they're just kind of showing that they are able to do this uh in the lab. They've built like little uh crawling, walking, and swimming robots using live tissue. So, you know, if the world wasn't strange and weird enough already for you, get ready for more of that. In the philosophy and consciousness front, researchers are now asking, is consciousness everywhere? So this is a very old idea in philosophy, but it's having a very public moment in the annals of of philosophy and the scientists. A lot of experts on what is at the basis of reality are starting to wonder if it's consciousness. This is called panpsychism. The claim is that consciousness goes all the way down. I think that um, you know, for a long time it's just kind of been assumed that humans are conscious and uh anything beyond that has been ignored, but a much older way of life, going back to indigenous times, has extended the idea of like of being being aware of itself uh through all of nature, through all of space, and um basically what's interesting is that scientists like Philip Goff uh and physicists actually are starting to agree with that picture, and it's a very ancient and strange picture, a very unusual way of looking at the world compared to um kind of what's taught or what's been taught in the last you know century in uh Western academia. And a couple more interesting findings and facts. The Internet of the Forest is our next uh segment. There is research that was taking place in the Amazon jungle in the canopy. Researchers played a predator alarm call into the trees, and then they're able to watch the signal of that alarm call travel through the trees via all kinds of species. Small birds were the main relayers of warning from one species to another, other species, including monkeys, would pick up the signal, and you know, so researchers were playing like the sound of maybe a jaguar. I'm not sure what they were playing, and then this was cascading around and spreading through the forest, spreading through the Amazon canopy, um, which is pretty interesting to think about. So, for a few seconds, dozens of species uh were linking up and creating an information network. And I'm not sure if that's ever really been observed in biology in before. It's a very interesting uh finding where the whole canopy, after kind of passing the message, hey, there's a predator coming this way, would go quiet. And uh so they're calling it the Internet of the Forest. It's a living, airborne, early warning system running over everyone's heads. And finally, uh, one other kind of cute piece of research is uh two beluga whales were shown a mirror, and they appear to have recognized their own reflections recently. Uh, they recognize the reflections as themselves. Mirror self-recognition is one of the classic markers of self-awareness. Almost nothing passes it, not many animals do. So far, the the club of self-recognition includes humans, great apes, elephants, and dolphins. And now beluugas are maybe being added to that list. Yeah, I've always wondered about cats. The wells use the glass to inspect their bodies, turning and checking. And so, yeah, they are now in the the club of creatures that are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. That's the news of the woo segment for today. This has been the Rough Draft. I'm Anthony Alvarado, and I want to end with a pretty exciting announcement. I'm actually going to be wrapping up this show. In fact, this might be the very last one. We'll see if we have time for one more or not. But I'm going to be starting a brand new show next month. I'm super excited about it. And I I probably shouldn't say too much about it right now because I'm still working out the details, but it's going to be here on X-ray, and you can also find it if you go to my website, anthonyalvarado.net. I'm sure I will have uh links to it, but it's going to be a little bit of a longer show. We're going to have guests on the show, and it's really it's super exciting. And I'm I'm not going to say any more because um, yeah, I want it, I want it to kind of be a surprise when it launches next month in August of 2026. But also, I want to say I've had a lot of fun doing the rough draft, and it was always meant to be a place to kind of experiment and try out different things, try out ideas and formats that I wouldn't have had the time and space to try on air in other in other ways. You know, this has been a very loose, very fun show to make for a while. And I hope you've enjoyed checking it out. I hope that you'll stick around and and check out uh what I'm working on next. Again, my name's Anthony Alvarado, and yeah, stay tuned for for more for a surprise new show coming in August. All right. Uh until then, peace out of the video.