Consumer News

After Tennant figured out how to keep its plants open during the pandemic, it had a second problem to solve.... Read more

Open-heart surgery is a hard thing to practice in the real world, and airplane pilots cannot learn from their mistakes midair. These are some scenarios where virtual reality solves really hard problems, but the technology has limits. That's the upshot of a review of experimental research on VR, published in... Read more

Large language models (LLMs), such as the model underpinning the functioning of the popular conversational platform ChatGPT, are now widely used by people worldwide to source information, as well as to summarize, analyze and generate texts. Studies examining the responses provided by LLMs in different scenarios could help to gain... Read more

Capcom doesn't have a huge presence for the Nintendo Switch 2 launch, but it is offering two stellar titles that have been released on other platforms. One game is "Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess," which is a surprisingly good game I reviewed last year, and the other is more well-known—"Street... Read more

Loot boxes and gacha are gambling-like products inside video games that players buy to obtain random rewards. Concerns have been raised about consumers, particularly children, experiencing financial harm and developing gambling problems. The previous Conservative UK government asked the industry, represented by Ukie, to try self-regulating, rather than to impose... Read more

Would you adjust your electricity consumption if you received a notification on your mobile phone telling you when electricity was going to be most expensive the following day? Research shows that good information can influence our energy consumption.... Read more

Learning to play music by ear is challenging for most musicians, but research from a team at the University of Waterloo may help musicians-in-training find the right notes.... Read more

An experimental study suggests that people are less likely to behave in a trusting and cooperative manner when interacting with AI than when interacting with other humans. Scientists use experimental games to probe how humans make social decisions requiring both rational and moral thinking.... Read more

When it comes to public attitudes toward using self-driving cars, understanding how the vehicles work is important—but so are less obvious characteristics like feelings of excitement or pleasure and a belief in technology's social benefits.... Read more

In the last several years, YouTube has become an increasingly formidable competitor to streaming services and entertainment studios, providing videos from amateur and professional creators, as well as livestreaming major events and NFL games.... Read more

In 2024, the New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, claiming the company had used the newspaper's content to train its algorithms without permission or payment.... Read more

Photovoltaic systems are increasingly being installed not only on roofs but also on open land. This does not always meet with citizens' approval. What is known as agrivoltaics (Agri-PV), however, is viewed more favorably, as researchers at the University of Bonn have now been able to show.... Read more

Efforts by social media platforms to encourage users to take breaks from screen scrolling may actually lead to some of them spending even more time online. That's according to research coauthored by University of Mississippi professor Christopher Newman.... Read more

Artificial intelligence (AI) might not have been created to enable new forms of sexual violence such as deepfake pornography. But that has been an unfortunate byproduct of the rapidly advancing technology.... Read more

Google unveiled the biggest update to its Android mobile operating system in years, weeks before its biggest competitor in the space, Apple Inc., is expected to give a preview of its overhauled iPhone software.... Read more