influence

Elon Musk and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both got something out of their controversial meeting on Monday. For Musk, it was a chance to win over public — and corporate — sympathy after his antisemitic posts on the platform he owns, X, triggered an exodus of advertisers.  Netanyahu left the meeting with a new deal that secured Israel’s control over Musk’s SpaceX Starlink satellites across Israel and Gaza. “Because he is such an influential and powerful person, he can get the attention of…

As Meta gears up for the 2024 election, the company is grappling with a new challenge that could slow its efforts to combat foreign attempts at election interference. US government agencies have stopped sharing information with the company’s security researchers about covert influence operations on its platform.Meta says that as of July, the government has “paused” briefings related to foreign election interference, eliminating a key source of information for the company. During a call with reporters, Meta’s head of…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), more than 80% of the global population are motivated by faith or spirituality. Faced with the triple planetary crises of pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change, what role can faith communities play in saving the planet? In a recent…

Twitter (the company that Elon Musk insists upon calling “X”) appears to be hemorrhaging advertisers. And it’s responded to this lost revenue by suing a prominent critic of the increasingly right-wing social media website: Media Matters, a left-leaning organization known for criticizing conservative and GOP-aligned outlets. Ordinarily, this lawsuit would be the kind of stunt that legal observers could probably ignore. The First Amendment provides extraordinarily robust protections against lawsuits that target speech.…

Recent research challenges conventional exercise science by revealing the significant role of the ‘rest and digest’ vagus nerve in physical activity. This study, utilizing advanced electrical recording techniques in sheep, demonstrates that vagal nerve activity increases during exercise, aiding the heart in pumping more blood. It focuses on the mediator vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP), which facilitates coronary vessel dilation. These findings have potential applications in treating heart diseases, particularly in…

Christian Nationalists were out in force at Mar-a-Lago on Friday night, once again demonstrating their proximity to MAGA power. Lance Wallnau — the chief promoter of a “Seven Mountains Mandate” for right-wing Christians to seize control over government and culture — was dressed in a tux and streaming live to his 1 million Facebook followers. The black-tie event was the America First Policy Institute gala at Trump’s Palm Beach estate, where the former president was soon to speak. As he filmed with his cell…

When I was a teenager, I declared that I did not like my grandma. My mother excoriated me not just for saying such a thing but for feeling it. That, in her eyes, made me a terrible person. She believed that. I tried not to.Our beliefs about emotions—whether we feel that they’re good or bad, controllable or uncontrollable, or useful or harmful—profoundly affect our life and relationships. Science has only recently committed itself to examining this issue, but it is now doing so with a vengeance. In 2020 the journal…

If she could talk to Taylor Swift, recent UC Berkeley grad Crystal Haryanto knows what she’d say:“When I was a kid, I would listen to you because I wanted to learn everything about you. But as I grew up, I realized that I was listening to you because I was learning everything about me.” Though she may never get the chance to meet the pop star, Haryanto will soon be sharing her love for all things Swift with some lucky students and fellow fans.She put together a course, “Artistry & Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version,”…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Research in the International Journal of Tourism Policy has shown how social media platforms can influence holidaymakers and travelers in seeking out destinations that have been the victims of adverse events, natural disasters or conflicts. The colloquial term "revenge tourism" was coined in 2021 for this kind of vacation where people sought out experiences to combat the negative impact of…

Partial dependencies of the vocabulary-related continuous predictor variable lexical richness in relation to the absolute (left) and relative (right) biodiversity richness, including a moving regression. Credit: People and Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1002/pan3.10551 Novels and poems often contain descriptions of plants or animals—sometimes more, sometimes less detailed. The extent to which flora and fauna feature in a literary work…