How could we engineer humans to have more empathy?

People are capable of amazing kindness, but also of unbelievable callousness. We go out of our way to help strangers, but we also turn a blind eye to misery. But what if you could make human beings kind all the time? What does science teach us about empathy, and how to create it in people? We decided to ask the experts.

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154L

No, dolphins are not your 'therapists.' So just stop it.

Though it might not fit with New Age dolphin lore, the reality is that dolphins, even those born in captivity, are wild. There's absolutely no evidence to support the burgeoning practice of dolphin-assisted therapy. Here's why dolphins are not healers — and why this practice needs to stop.

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70L

The robot revolution movie from the Zombieland writers has a director

Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick found a clever twist on zombie uprisings with Zombieland, and now they're giving us a look at the aftermath of a failed robot revolution, with their new movie Epsilon. Which just found itself a somewhat surprising director.

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23L

A teenager's brain, converted into a binary decision tree

This is an amazing chart. Found by cultural historian Megan Prelinger, it's from a 1963 book where the authors wanted to represent what a binary decision tree looks like. They modeled their "decision" example on the steps a teenager makes in deciding whether to be truant or not.

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18L

Behold a piece of art that could only be created in zero gravity

What do you do if you're a physicist and want to get experiments done in microgravity, but can't drum up the cash to go to space? You use magnets to both get results and make a picture that looks like it came out of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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3L
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