While food noise has become a more common term in recent years, there’s no consensus on an official definition. Researchers from Penn State studied how the phenomenon is discussed on TikTok and how people experience it in order to better define the concept and guide future interventions to help manage it.

Laughter is a universal social signal that connects us with others, but the brain regions underlying laughter are not well understood, in part because it’s hard to elicit genuine laughter in the lab. 

In a review publishing on June 23 in the Cell Press journal Trends in Neurosciences, researchers analyze reports from medical procedures in which the brain is electrically stimulated in awake patients. Laughter can be an unintentional byproduct of these stimulations, allowing scientists to pinpoint laughter-evoking brain areas. By examining these reports and other clinical and animal studies, the authors describe two distinct networks in the brain for laughter: one that elicits spontaneous outbursts, and another that produces voluntary, conversational laughter. 

How technology is used to abuse and coercively control survivors of intimate partner violence

Vaibhav Diwanji, a mass commiunications researcher at the University of Kansas, has published a study detailing four experiments he conducted on the effectiveness of AI-derived advertising. The results showed that placement on a website, type of ad, relevance to content contained on the site and other factors could deliver ads people found useful and positively influenced their attitudes toward the advertiser without using surveillance of the persons' internet behaviors. This counters prevailing industry wisdom that spying is necessary for effective advertising, and comes at a time that the future of online privacy is being debated and regulation of such surveillance is increasing, Diwanji argues.