The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab analyzes data to detect and document threats to civilians in violations of international humanitarian law. HRL recently joined the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition, a network of organizations working to protect healthcare systems in areas of conflict, especially as healthcare facilities in conflict areas face increasing threats of violence.

“Our lab is at the forefront of this work, doing coverage of damage to healthcare facilities,” said Danielle Poole, director of research for HRL.

According to Poole, HRL uses a combination of satellite imagery and other remote sensing data with open source information, such as social media, in order to document threats to civilians in near real time. Their method of data collection makes it possible to gain a comprehensive understanding of damage done.

By applying their data collection methods to track attacks on healthcare in conflict zones in violation of international humanitarian law, including aerial strikes to hospitals and clinics, as well as attacks on healthcare workers, the HRL creates documentation that can be used in advocacy efforts of the SHCC.

The SHCC includes non-governmental organizations, civil society groups and academic centers concerned with violence against healthcare and conflict. The coalition produces an annual report on attacks on healthcare around the globe and advocates in international forums to engage institutions and create mechanisms to protect healthcare in conflict.

“There has been a real lack of public data in standard systems for documentation,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of HRL. “We want to improve how data is being standardized into official counts so that there is more accountability, and information to help rebuild.”

HRL has already been documenting attacks on health facilities in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, among other areas in conflict. According to Poole, early analyses from the lab have shown that for certain periods of those particular conflicts, almost two-thirds of health facilities were damaged, demonstrating a clear failure to abide by international humanitarian law.

Reports released from HRL have contributed to criminal indictments from the International Criminal Court in the past. In March 2024, arrest warrants were issued for senior military officials in Russia only days after the HRL released a report identifying 223 incidents of damage to Ukraine’s power infrastructure.

The News spoke to professionals at Yale who had investigated the targeting of healthcare systems in Ukraine during the conflict.

“We are barely understanding the scope of this issue,” said Andrey Zinchuk, assistant professor at the School of Medicine, who has done humanitarian work training healthcare professionals in Ukraine, “they’re systematically targeting hospitals, clinics and medical facilities.”

The destruction of healthcare facilities in Ukraine not only devastates physical infrastructure but also results in massive loss of life, disrupts medical staff, and presents long-term consequences on the region’s ability to recover, according to Frederick Altice, a professor at the School of Medicine who has done global health work in Ukraine.

Altice described how attackers justify attacks on healthcare facilities by claiming that they are used to harbor hostages, as well as how cuts to USAID will further strain resources and force healthcare providers to make difficult triage decisions in an already fragile system.

The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab is a part of the School of Public Health.

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“My favorite planet, of course! Mars!” exclaims the protagonist, Mia.

In her custom-built spaceship, Mia embarks on a fantastical journey to Mars with her co-pilot cat, Nebula. They meet the “Martians,” based on the real-life rovers of Mars throughout the story. Enlisting the rovers’ help, Mia learns the lesson of perseverance and finds a way back home to Earth. 

To bring this story to the page, astrophysicists Emma Louden GRD ’26 and Tanya Harrison partnered with Wouter Pasman, an illustrator and space enthusiast to co-author their debut children’s book.

Louden, a fifth year Yale astronomy graduate student, described the permanence of a book on someone’s shelf to be a new undertaking in her outreach endeavors. The story is personal to Louden, for Mia’s wonder is based on Louden’s adoration of space and exploration since childhood. 

Louden’s ability to share her love of the night sky, the power of stories and the beauty of the universe is why she chose to bring this book into the world. 

“Sharing a piece of you that matters so much is a very vulnerable moment, and vulnerability is what makes connection,” Louden said.

For Pasman, the most difficult and rewarding challenge of illustrating the book was depicting the rovers.

Pasman wanted the rovers to appear childlike while accurately portraying the designs of the real rovers. He closely collaborated with Louden and Harrison throughout the process. 

“The [rovers] are very complex (even to draw), but I wanted them to look sort of similar to their real-life counterparts,” Pasman wrote to the News, “So I used 3D models and stripped the rovers of all elements which were not important for the overall image of the rover or the story. By this, I could find a nice balance between scientific accuracy and stylized form. But then to give them eyes and personality was a lot of fun.”

The end result is a book to which families can cozy up with their children and share for generations.

Ashley Hayden, a mother from the greater New Haven community, frequently reads “Mia and the Martians” to her children, who are avid space fans. The book includes journal pages of authentic scientific facts and a “Design Your Own Rover” tutorial.

“This book was the perfect way to educate kids about Mars and its exploration history because it took us with Mia, who’s spirit and excitement about space my kids can identify with, on a captivating journey while sprinkling in all the real world facts and missions,” Hayden wrote to the News. 

After reading the book. Hayden took her son to see the planetarium show Mars 1001 at Yale’s Leitner Family Observatory and Planetarium, or LFOP. When the rover drove onto the screen, Hayden’s son immediately recognized it as the same one from the book.

Louden’s favorite frame pays tribute to the iconic photograph “Pale Blue Dot” taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft 3.7 billion miles from Earth. Emma has this illustrated frame by Pasman on her desk.

In the story, while Mia looks at Earth growing larger and larger in the window, transforming from a tiny dot into a brilliant blue and green globe, she remarks to her cat, “We need to take care of our home, Nebula. It’s the only one we got.”

“Mia and the Martians” is available for purchase on Amazon and at Barnes and Noble. 

The post Yale astronomy graduate student writes a Martian adventure children’s book appeared first on Yale Daily News.

For others, her plump features and unconventional proportions may seem more peculiar than cute.

“It’s the wrong size, and it’s supposed to be really big, but it’s really small,” said Chrysie Alexiou, a postgraduate fellow in the Child Study Center and a production and design staffer at the News. “It looks full grown, but tiny.”

According to experts the News spoke to, Moo Deng’s appeal — or lack thereof — comes down to personal interpretation of “baby schema” traits. Her large eyes, round face and clumsy movements tick many of the boxes that trigger caregiving instincts. However, her unusual size and hippo-specific features — like her wide snout and stubby legs — may deviate from the classic markers of cuteness. 

Cuteness is more than just a preference, it’s a carefully wired response in the brain. Animals like Moo Deng and Pesto the penguin possess traits — large eyes, round cheeks and playful behavior — that trigger emotional responses designed to ensure the survival of vulnerable young. But why do these reactions spill over to non-human animals and even inanimate objects? Yale experts weigh in on the science of why we find some things irresistibly cute.

“There’s these features that when present, will trigger in us that all of a sudden we have knowledge that this is an infant that needs protection,” Oriana Aragón, psychology researcher, said. “You can see these features all or in part, on anything, and it will trigger this same response.”

Baby schema, or Kindchenschema, a concept developed by ethologist Konrad Lorenz, outlines the specific physical features that make something appear cute and elicit caregiving responses, such as large eyes and rounded cheeks. These features, often associated with vulnerability, act as visual signals that compel individuals to nurture and protect.

According to Aragón, these reactions extend beyond human infants. 

“We’re wired to respond to these traits wherever we see them,” Aragón said. “Even a mini stapler or a VW Beetle can trigger the same caregiving instincts as a baby animal.”

While cuteness may start with baby schema, it also activates the brain’s reward system. Neurotransmitters like dopamine and endorphins flood the brain in response to cute stimuli, creating feelings of pleasure. Dr. Rebecca Dyer, assistant professor of psychology at Hamilton College, explained that this response engages the same neural pathways that process other rewarding experiences, such as food or music.

The emotional reactions elicited by cuteness are often instinctive. Dr. John Bargh, professor of psychology, described these responses as automatic processes deeply rooted in evolutionary survival strategies. 

“Human infants are incredibly vulnerable at birth, requiring constant care,” Bargh said. “Our emotional responses to baby-like features ensure that caregiving behaviors are activated without conscious thought.”

However, it’s not simply about looks.

Playful behaviors, like Moo Deng’s happy leg-nibbling or Pesto’s waddling, amplify their appeal by reinforcing associations with innocence and vulnerability. 

“These behaviors map onto our mental knowledge of baby behavior,” Bargh explained. 

While cuteness can make people want to care for and protect, it can also inspire a surprising reaction: cute aggression.

This phenomenon, characterized by wanting to squeeze or pinch something adorable, may seem counterintuitive, but it serves an emotional purpose.

“It helps regulate overwhelming positive emotions,” said Aragón. “When someone feels overwhelmed by cuteness, cute aggression acts as a way to balance those feelings, bringing them back to a calmer emotional state.”

The influence of cuteness, however, is not limited to caregiving. Social media platforms amplify exposure to cute animals like Moo Deng, using algorithms that prioritize attention-grabbing content. 

According to Aragón, this constant exposure has heightened the cultural fascination with cuteness.

“We’re exposed to far more instances of cuteness than ever before,” said Bargh. “And we often actively seek them out in our feeds.”

Ultimately, Moo Deng, Pesto and even Handsome Dan highlight the fascinating blend of biology, psychology and culture that shapes our response to cuteness. Whether it’s the wide eyes and clumsy antics of a pygmy hippo or the droopy charm of Yale’s beloved mascot, these traits tap into deeply ingrained instincts, sparking joy, compassion and sometimes even a little aggression. Cuteness serves as a universal force, creating connections between individuals and the world around them. As Bargh aptly put it, “It’s spontaneous, automatic and completely irresistible.”

The Handsome Dan tradition began with undergraduate Andrew Graves, who had the first Handsome Dan in 1892.

The post Moo Deng mania: The science behind viral cuteness appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Qiu studies how light is absorbed by different materials, providing insight on creating solar energy and driving chemical reactions with sunlight. The PECASE award was given to nearly 400 scientists and engineers researching topics ranging from artificial intelligence to astrophysics.

“Our research is kind of a fundamental understanding of materials, where the materials themselves have applications in things like energy science, quantum information and electronics,” Qiu told the News.

In particular, Qiu and her team develop computational and theoretical tools to describe particle interactions.

At the microscopic level, Qiu said, different materials respond very differently to light, and it is important to notice these variations. The materials she and her team study could potentially be used in quantum computers or other electronics. 

“A lot of these experiments rely on things like shining ultra fast, ultra short, intense pulses of light or at materials and seeing how they respond,” Qiu said.

Qiu was drawn to studying science from a young age, and she valued that if she entered academia, she could have a research lab and explore many different research ideas at the same time.

Though Qiu was interested in physics as an undergraduate at Yale, she also explored different subjects, including philosophy and comparative literature. Ultimately, though, she found her passion in condensed-matter physics, which explains how physics governs materials in a solid state.

“[What makes me excited about physics is that it] really gives you a very different picture of the way the universe works,” Qiu said. “It’s very counter to your everyday intuition.”

Qiu is part of the Energy Sciences Institute on West Campus, which she describes as a “great collaborative environment.”

At the Institute, she is able to work alongside other professors working in subjects related to energy and quantum materials, like professor Cong Su.

“Whenever I measure something, I usually go to Diana and ask for a solution, ask for her insight from a theoretical perspective,” Su said. “She might also be able to provide me with some calculation results which, for example, corroborate or explain what we’re seeing from the experiment.”

Qiu is also grateful for the postdoc and graduate students who have worked with her over the years and who continue to work with her.

Bowen Hou was Qiu’s first doctoral student, and he has been studying with her for three and a half years. 

According to Hou, Qiu encourages the team to explore research they are interested in, which he appreciates.

“[You have the freedom] to explore more,” Hou said. “Not only our own area, but also some other area, like machine learning.”

Throughout his time working with her, Hou is grateful for the advice that Qiu has given him. In particular, when the issue is outside of her subject field, she is able to connect him with relevant researchers.

“The culture and atmosphere in the group is really great,” Hou said. “We have a collaborative atmosphere.”

Qiu hopes to continue to expand her research in new directions, including exploring transient materials, whose properties can change depending on the presence of light. However, in this subject, computational tools are only recently being developed.

This research is computationally heavy, and Qiu and her team are currently working on creating AI and machine learning tools to assist them.

PECASE was established in 1996 by then-President Bill Clinton LAW ’73.

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Gavin Susantio DIV ’25 said he is closely awaiting when the planets will align. He photographed a similar Parade in the early mornings of summer 2022. 

“I used to sleep under a hanging Solar System from my bedroom ceiling as a child, and the planets would glow in the dark. To see the actual depiction of that not by staring at my ceiling but at ‘the heavens’ was both out of this world and a childhood dream come true. The Parade of four planets and the Moon in 2022 was already spectacular. But to see six planets in January might be a once-in-a-century opportunity!” Susantio wrote to the News.

This week, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn can be easily viewed with the unaided eye. 

Members of the Astronomy Department and the Staff of the Leitner Family Observatory and Planetarium, or LFOP, have received an uptick of inquiries regarding the Parade’s viewing. 

“It’s not a super common thing to be able to see so many planets at the same time, and since they’re all so bright in the sky it’s super cool to be able to easily pick them out when they’re all lined up. Planets are one of the first things I learned how to identify in the night sky,” Em Sanzone ’26, an astrophysics major who received such inquiries, told the News. “They’re bright enough that you can see them from New Haven with light pollution, which is really exciting!”

The planets are akin to the Sun in that they rise in the East and set in the West. In the “Parade,” the Planets march along the ecliptic, the plane in which the planets orbit around the Sun in our Solar System. The seven other planets, the Moon and the Sun will always lie along this ecliptic path when viewed from Earth. That is how seasoned stargazers know where planets will be in the sky: facing South going from East to West.

Walking down from Science Hill on Prospect Street, a Yalie should be able to see Venus and Saturn light up the sky. They will appear high in the southwest sky for about two hours after sunset. Look for the brightest “star,” that’s actually Venus, and the “star” below it is Saturn. Jupiter is high in the sky from the Southeast, and Mars lies in the East. They will follow the Path of the Ecliptic, setting in the West at dawn. 

There have also been viewings on Cross Campus with members from the Yale community and beyond.

Parker Ellison ’28 volunteered at an outreach event where the Yale community and New Haven residents were invited to observe the Parade. He operated a telescope for passersby.

“One moment that stood out to me was when people realized that the bright ‘star’ they had been noticing in the night sky was actually Jupiter. Being able to watch their excitement as they looked through the telescope and saw its bands and moons up close highlights what makes these events so meaningful. Experiences like this inspire curiosity and help people feel more connected to the night sky,” Ellison wrote to the News.

Uranus and Neptune are not visible with the naked eye in New Haven, but can be viewed by binoculars or a telescope. Uranus will be westward of Jupiter, and Neptune will be eastward of Venus. 

Cloud cover checkers from groups such as Clear Dark Sky and the National Digital Forecast Database should be checked for the best nights for viewing. Free software applications such as Stellarium can be personalized to time, date and location of a user. There are also various mobile applications one can use when planet hunting outside. Additionally, it will be possible to photograph the event. 

This planet viewing has persisted a large trend on social media, and Ellis Eisenberg ’27 has led efforts to help others spot the Parade.

“To me, the best part is seeing how many people are enthusiastic about space. We live in pretty divisive times, and I think it’s truly special that regardless of someone’s personal beliefs, we can all appreciate the beauty of the night sky,” Eisenberg said.

Further skywatching tips can be found here. 

The post Yale experiences Planet Parade appeared first on Yale Daily News.

In a Dec. 3 report, HRL exposed Russia’s deliberate and systematic program of forcibly deporting Ukrainian children into coerced adoption and fostering — a program that researchers describe as one of the largest missing persons crises since World War II.

“The evidence compiled by the Humanitarian Research Lab researchers could lead to additional charges against Russian President Vladimir Putin; Maria Lvova-Belova, presidential commissioner for children’s rights; and other officials involved in the extensive forced relocation program in the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, told the News.

Yale HRL found at least 314 Ukrainian children, primarily from the Eastern Donbas region, who since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have been forcibly deported and listed in Russian adoption databases. The program aimed to assimilate these children into Russian society, erasing their Ukrainian identities.

Many of these children were nationalized as Russian citizens and placed with families under a program ordered and directed by Putin.

“This whole program is an act of deception by Russia,” Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of the HRL, explained. “Underlying it was the placement of children in a database where it looked as if they came from places in Russia … when in fact, they were from Ukraine.”

The deception extended beyond databases. According to the HRL, Russia had altered personally identifiable information, or PII, and even manipulated adoption profiles to disguise the Ukrainian origin of the children, presenting them instead as Russian citizens. 

“This was a game of cat and mouse between the HRL researchers and the Russians,” Raymond said. “We were constantly worried that the databases would be taken down, but through incredible dedication, our team uncovered children hiding in plain sight.”

Connecting the dots: A wall that exposed the Russian operation

Yale’s investigation into Russia’s forced adoption program was anything but straightforward. Over 20 months, researchers meticulously pieced together fragments of data scattered across open sources, relying on sharp observation and advanced technology. Among the breakthroughs in their work was a single clue that changed the course of the investigation: the discovery of a wall.

“The original lead was paint on a wall,” Raymond recounted. The image, taken in a Russian facility, featured children standing in front of a teal and yellow wall. This wall matched the backdrop of another photograph that had surfaced online of children being transported to a “temporary accommodation center” in Russia.

“Russia had made a mistake in their tradecraft. By not changing the location, they unintentionally left a visual breadcrumb,” Raymond said.

Yet the wall was only the starting point of HRL’s investigation. 

Researchers utilized high-resolution satellite imagery and database cross-referencing to confirm children’s movements across Russia. 

“The critical use of satellite imagery in this report was the planes,” Raymond explained. “Being able to use archival, commercially available imagery to identify planes at locations … we correlated these findings with visual data from on-the-ground sources to build a complete picture of how these children were moved.”

Later, investigators also uncovered evidence of deliberate obfuscation by Russian authorities. 

Leaked government documents detailed meetings where the relocation of children was discussed. These documents provided insight into how Russian officials coordinated efforts to move children, create legal justifications for their adoption and hide the children’s Ukrainian origin.

From linguistics to satellite image analysis, team members came together to discover and reconstruct the movements and identities of the 314 Ukrainian children. Half of these children were siblings, further complicating efforts to track and confirm their identities.

“Each child identified had to meet a high-confidence standard,” Raymond said. “We used the NATO Admiralty system for evaluating evidence and corroborated findings with independent sources.”

This included verifying the children’s origins in Ukraine, matching their presence at transit locations, and identifying them in Russian databases and records while keeping the investigation absolutely confidential.

The team created detailed dossiers on each kid they could identify for Ukrainian law enforcement, the Ukrainian government and the International Criminal Court to facilitate the children’s return.

The toll of deportations and path to accountability

The forced deportation and coerced adoption of Ukrainian children have inflicted profound psychological and emotional harm on both the children and their families. As detailed in the HRL report, the program has “separated siblings, erased cultural identities, and placed children in unfamiliar and hostile environments” where they were subjected to “Russification” efforts.

Caitlin Howarth, an HRL researcher, said that the team found records of children who experienced “acute and prolonged psychological distress.”

“One child was forced to choose between accepting a guardianship and losing her three younger siblings,” Howarth said. “Another showed signs of social withdrawal and depression after being placed with a Russian family.”

At the program’s core was an effort to sever the children’s ties to their Ukrainian heritage. The systemic renunciation of Ukrainian citizenship, combined with the imposition of Russian identities, cut off children from their families, language, and homeland.

Such an account only represents a sliver of the larger issue. “We know that what we have documented is only the tip of the iceberg,” Howarth noted.

According to Hathway, the report aims to provide facts and figures to accountability mechanisms such as the International Criminal Court and Ukrainian criminal courts. 

“The HRLs’ legal analysis of the evidence they collected establishes a basis for potential crimes against humanity, war crimes and perhaps even part of a broader case of genocide,” Hathway explained in the School of Public Health Q&A about the report.

By providing evidence of the ongoing forced deportation, the HRL can provide evidence for the courts to take action against Putin, Maria Lyova-Belova and other officials who have been involved in this process. 

Previously, HRL research reports have been the basis of the Criminal Court’s prosecutions of senior Russian officials, including Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This Wednesday,  Raymond appeared before the United Nations to present the HRL’s findings.

“The real credit goes to the investigators, who worked with incredible dedication to ensure these children were not lost in the shadows,” Raymond said.

The Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014.

The post Yale HRL uncovers Russian forced deportation and adoption of Ukrainian children appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The team placed second in the Rainforest competition, organized by XPRIZE, a non-profit organization that organizes public competitions for technological developments that will benefit humanity. Map of Life developed a database to help scientists, researchers and conservation groups to better understand biodiversity trends and protect endangered species. 

The heart of Map of Life is actively assessing the status of different species in specific areas of the world. Over the past years, to go beyond model-based predictions, the team has added a novel Rapid Assessments, or MOLRA, technology. The team then leveraged the combination of models and local sampling for the XPRIZE Rainforest competition.

“Our survey technology involves sending a fleet of semi-autonomous drones into a site to collect visual, audio, and environmental DNA (eDNA) samples which are then processed through our state-of-the-art machine learning workflows to retrieve species identifications, site characteristics, and other important insights,” Tamara Rudic, team member, wrote to the News.

According to Walter Jetz, director of the Yale Center for Biodiversity and Global Change, the Map of Life went live around 12 years ago.

While the use of drones for wildlife data collection is not entirely new in biodiversity research, MOLRA sets itself apart from other technologies by blending species distribution knowledge with cutting-edge sample processing methods. 

The XPRIZE Rainforest competition launched in 2019, and the MOLRA team, in collaboration with the YBGC Center and the Field Museum of Natural History, spent the next two years developing their proposal. 

The team officially qualified for the competition after submitting their plan to XPRIZE in May of 2021, where they detailed the feasibility of their drone-based data collection solution. 

The next big milestone for the team came in the summer of 2022 when it was chosen as a semifinalist for the competition.

“For the following year, our team was hard at work testing and tweaking our solution – initially in our cold Connecticut backyards, and finally in real rainforest locations,” Jetz wrote. 

The team then traveled to Singapore to compete in the semifinals alongside fourteen other teams at the Central Catchment Nature Reserve, the first formal field test of their solution.

For Jetz, Rudic and the rest of the team, this competition stage was a success. However, the team also realized that they needed to incorporate environmental DNA — collected from environmental samples like soil, air or water — into their data collection alongside audiovisual information.

“We quickly got in contact with collaborators at Rutgers University, the Federal University of Amazonas and others to build a robust eDNA component to our sampling plan,” Jetz. 

With global accessibility a top priority for the MOLRA team, another critical challenge during the competition was designing the drone missions in a cost-effective and easily reproducible way. 

Apart from utilizing free and open-source software, the team had to work around the design limitations of affordable unmanned aerial vehicle platforms. 

“We developed a lot of really clever hardware hacks and reverse-engineered a lot of the control systems for these drones and ended up with a system that could be deployed by someone with minimal additional equipment virtually anywhere in the world with minimal to no direct assistance needed from our small team,” Kevin Winner, modeling lead at the YBGC Center, noted.

XPRIZE announced the MOLRA team as one of six finalists in the fall of 2023. The team members then continued testing their solution in the Amazon rainforest or polishing the software and machine learning algorithms behind their biodiversity assessment technology.

Now, with $2 million in prize money, the MOLRA team hopes to grow its innovation.

The prize money will go toward making the MOLRA solution more accessible and globally deployed, thanks to a Yale Ventures-backed university spinoff that will help grow staff, increase involvement with high-impact projects, and continue refinement of the MOLRA technology. 

The team also aims to build on the YBGC Center’s work with global biodiversity management partners to guide future conservation efforts and decisions and to aid efforts such as the Half-Earth Project. 

“It’s the combination of these scientific products on how species are distributed around the world with the on-the-ground monitoring of MOLRA that will make large scale species-based monitoring more efficient and effective,” Alex Killion, managing director at the YBGC Center, wrote. 

For more information on Map of Life Rapid Assessments, see here.

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In a project organized by four researchers, including three from the School of Medicine, researchers tasked readers with blindly reviewing 34 essays, 22 of which were human-written and 12 which were generated by artificial intelligence. Typically, they rated the composition and structure of the AI-generated essays higher. However, if they believed an essay was AI-generated, they were less likely to rank it as one of the overall best essays. 

Ultimately, the readers only accurately distinguished between AI and human essays 50 percent of the time, raising questions about the role of AI in academia and education. 

“How would we even know, other than the word of the author, whether the paper was assisted by generative AI?” Dr. Lee Schwamm, associate dean of digital strategy and transformation at the School of Medicine, said. 

Schwamm, a researcher at the School of Medicine, was part of the team that conducted this research project. 

Given the increased prevalence of generative AI, Schwamm was curious about how similar it was to human work. While the project’s readers couldn’t effectively differentiate between AI and human writing, Schwamm and his colleagues noticed some unique characteristics.

“Human essays are very different from AI essays,” Schwamm said. “The AI essays are very predictable and consistent internally in terms of their sentence structure, the kinds of words they use, the tone that they adopt.”

According to Schwamm, AI writing will inevitably be part of today’s world and its role in society is up for debate.

Schwamm thinks that the combination of AI and human thought could be helpful, potentially leading to more desirable products in many aspects of life.

“We have to decide whether or not we think that there’s a new playing field,” Schwamm said. “Where do we incorporate AI?”

Generative AI is already being incorporated into Yale education.

Economics professor Tolga Koker incorporates generative AI into his introductory microeconomics class. He asks one essay question on his midterm and final exam ahead of time, and students are allowed to use AI to formulate their responses.

In this semester’s midterm, Koker asked students how they could use economic concepts, such as representative heuristics and framing, to succeed at their dream jobs. 

“It’s better to teach the students the new technology so that they will be prepared when they graduate,” Koker said.

Technology is advancing, Koker said, and it doesn’t make sense to ignore it when it will continue to be an influential part of students’ lives. However, AI can’t do everything for students, Koker said. 

Koker does not think AI inherently makes students lazy, either.

“There is [still] competition among the students,” Koker said. “Whoever uses the AI better will be a bit ahead.”

However, some educators do not think AI will play a part in their teaching. 

Biology lecturer Amaleah Hartman believes AI has a limited role in her classes. 

According to Hartman, students can’t use AI to fabricate lab results; they must do the work themselves to complete lab reports. 

“I simply acknowledge that AI tools exist and should be used responsibly,” Hartman wrote to the News. “It can be used to slim down their original writing to fit word limits or communicate more effectively, not to do their homework for them.”

Hartman hopes that students recognize the dangers of AI.

If students misuse AI, they might not learn as much, said Hartman, and their education will be less meaningful.

“I hope students fear more than just getting caught,” Hartman wrote. “[They need to be aware of] the temptation to let AI do their thinking for them and therefore not learn for themselves.”

According to Yale College, inserting AI-generated text into an assignment without proper attribution violates academic integrity.

The post Readers can’t accurately distinguish between AI and human essays, researchers find appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Raskin led a nine-person team that proved the geometric portion of the Langlands conjectures, a theoretical framework for fundamental relationships between three branches of math: number theory, harmonic analysis and geometry. This achievement has far-reaching implications for mathematics, physics and quantum field theory. 

“We always knew that there was some very big mystery, and until we solve that we won’t be able to do the full proof,” said Dennis Gaitsgory, director of the Max Planck Institute for mathematics in Bonn, Germany, who worked closely with Raskin on his team. “I thought it would take decades to prove it, and suddenly they cracked it.”

The Langlands program — originally proposed in 1967 by former Yale doctoral student and professor Robert Langlands — is a series of conjectures that suggest deep connections between seemingly unrelated areas of math. These conjectures have been fundamental to modern mathematics and unlock new ways of thinking about mathematical ideas.

Raskin, a professor of mathematics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, proved the geometric Langlands program. His research specifically focuses on algebraic geometry: using shapes and geometry to imagine algebraic equations. Raskin’s team formulated Langlands’ number theory conjecture in terms of geometry, and then proceeded to prove it. 

The monumental accomplishment is the product of over thirty years of research in the field of the geometric Langlands conjectures. Given its highly detailed and abstract nature, Gaitsgory noted that it would take months, if not years, to simply explain all the definitions needed to understand the work, and that the scope of the achievement is almost impossible for people without an advanced mathematics background to comprehend.

“It is extremely beautiful, beautiful mathematics, which is connected very much with other mathematics and with mathematical physics,” said Alexander Beilinson, a University of Chicago professor who has worked closely with Raskin in the past. 

Raskin was first introduced to this research as an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago, where he worked with Beilinson and Vladimir Drinfeld, mathematicians who first explored the idea of the geometric conjecture. He later completed his doctorate at Harvard, where he further pursued research in the field with Gaitsgory, his Ph.D. advisor. 

Raskin said he has always been interested in the field of Langlands conjectures, and has explored different approaches to research throughout his career. He compares his work to experimental science in the sense that he closely monitors other researchers’ contributions to the fields and chooses less-attempted approaches to delve into.

“Mathematical research isn’t necessarily geared towards big problems, but it’s geared towards incremental progress and understanding things a little bit better,” Raskin said. “And sometimes you have a new idea which is interesting, and you play with it; if you get really lucky, then it connects to some big stuff.

One of the main breakthroughs came during a tumultuous time in his life. A few weeks after Raskin and Joakim Faergeman, a Yale graduate student, had published a crucial paper, Raskin drove his wife to the hospital, where she stayed for six weeks before the birth of their second child. 

During this time, Raskin used the long hours driving from home, school and the hospital, to call Gaitsgory and discuss ideas for the proof. 

“There’s been a lot of progress, but there have been certain hurdles no one’s ever really been able to get past,” Raskin said. “Somehow, somewhere in there, in essentially the worst week of my life, I managed to get past the last hurdle.” 

Gaitsgory explained another potential significance for science: physicists Anton Kapustin and Edward Witten independently realized that the geometric Langlands conjecture was a consequence of quantum field theory. Therefore, according to Gaitsgory, this research offers mathematical proof for particular behaviors in quantum field theory. 

Aside from the final proof, the research that Raskin and his collaborators have been producing over the past decades has shaped the field of Langlands conjectures, and has unlocked new relationships in modern mathematics.

“Even that process of just contributing knowledge [to] the field without solving the full proof is

what 90 percent of my life consisted of,” Gaitsgory said. “But it was satisfying enough.”

In the future, Raskin and Gaitsgory plan to continue working in the field of Langlands conjectures, and they feel that there is still much information to be discovered. 

Sam Raskin received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2014.

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Paul Hoffman, director of Yale Mental Health and Counseling, emphasized that overuse of social media is linked to mental health issues among students.

“Young adults who spend more time on social media and more time on their phones tend to experience more depression and anxiety and tend to not form as strong relationships,” Ada Fenick, a professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine, told the News.

Social media platforms encourage endless scrolling, impulsive behaviors, and the need for instant gratification. According to a study, an estimated 210 million people worldwide suffer from addiction to social media and the internet.

Marc Potenza, a professor of psychiatry, child study and neuroscience at the School of Medicine, noted that with considerable changes in the digital technology landscape, particularly in the rise of smartphones over the past several decades, there have been significant changes in mental health, especially in adolescents and young adults.

“Currently, about 95 percent of high school-aged teenagers have access to smartphones, and it’s estimated from Pew Research Center data that both in 2022 and 2023 about 46 percent of high school-age teenagers report being online almost constantly, an increase from about half of that amount, about 24 percent, in 2015,” Potenza said.

The data linking social media use to anxiety and depression among adolescents led the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, to generate an advisory in 2023 about social media use and youth mental health. Murthy also wrote an opinion in The New York Times that social media sites should contain warning labels similar to those of tobacco and alcohol products to warn of the potential adverse effects of consumption.

As part of a Cooperation in Science and Technology initiative, Potenza and colleagues generated an e-booklet that focuses on how to prevent problematic usage of the internet. Potenza highlighted that it is important to reserve completely tech-free times, replacing digital devices with analog devices as needed, especially in the hour before bedtime.

“People can often feel compelled or engaged with content that can be detrimental to their mental health, especially if they are going through a period of increased anxiety or depression,” Hoffman wrote to the News. “It can be very important that people be mindful about the content they are consuming because often the very goal of the algorithms is to keep you mindlessly engaged.”

Fenick told the News that social media companies have become quite good at creating “quick hits” that make viewers feel for a moment as if their “dopamine receptors are on fire.”

She encourages students to view their phones and social media as learning tools and not as easy access to entertainment for every minute of the day.

“Get off social media if you can, but if you feel like you want to use it, then I would set yourself a limit for how much time you spend on social media,” Fenick said. “I would set a limit not just on how much time, but on which apps you use. Be very thoughtful about what you’re using it for and what your purpose is, and try to make sure that you spend at least that amount of time or more on interactions with other humans in real life.”

Francesco Casetti, Sterling Professor of Humanities and film and media studies, and Neta Alexander, an assistant professor of film and media teaching algorithmic literacy, noted the addictive nature of social media. This spring, the two professors will be co-teaching a new seminar called “Media Anxieties.”

Alexander explained that algorithmic recommendation systems are strategically designed to exploit cognitive vulnerabilities to maximize screen time. 

“These platforms are designed to be addictive by using intermittent rewards and trying to invoke negative emotional responses such as rage, anxiety and jealousy, which are known to prolong our engagement and deepen our attachment to our devices,” Alexander said.

Alexander recommended that to limit the harmful effects of excessive social media use, students could download screen time apps that set strict limits or “lock” themselves out of their favorite platform and prioritize in-person activities. She also recommended students turn off notifications from social media apps or switch their smartphone display to grayscale — which is less distracting and eye-catching. She noted that implementing these simple strategies is especially important at nighttime when tech companies are competing with sleep and users’ biological needs.

Alexander told the News that it is important not to generalize the effects and potential harms of social media platforms, as they depend on the user’s age, support system, lived experience and other factors.

“Social media platforms like Instagram and X have been shown to be correlated with self-harm, anxiety, depression and social isolation,” Alexander wrote. “Such concerns are backed by empirical studies, including data collected, concealed and ignored by the tech companies themselves and revealed by whistleblowers.” 

She explained that several concerning trends, such as an epidemic of body dysmorphia, self-hatred and attention deficits, have arisen among teenagers leading tech-dependent lives.

Alexander noted that the ubiquitous use of “beauty filters” and AI-generated images and videos gives rise to impossible beauty standards and pushes young users toward dangerous and unnecessary plastic surgeries.

“Social media platforms quantify relationship, intimacy, and attention by creating a 24/7 culture of swiping, liking, and commenting,” Alexander wrote. “This might lead to enhanced anxiety and low self-esteem. [There’s also this] constant need to keep up with the most up-to-date, increasingly expensive personal electronic and data packages, which put financial pressure on teenagers.”

Casetti told the News he had taught a class last semester called “Scared to Death: Fear, Threats and Media,” and that one of the prerequisites for registering for the class was to accept the idea of fasting from social media for 24 hours and writing a diary.

He noted that he received many surprising entries and that one-tenth of the class was unable to suspend their connection with the media for 24 hours.

“One student wrote that he touched the Instagram icon by accident because it was an involuntary gesture,” Casetti said. “And once he was reconnected with his Instagram, he broke the promise to be away from the social network for 24 hours.”

He noted that other students admitted their surrender for other reasons, with one writing “I was scared to be alone with my thoughts” in their entry.

Casetti recalled that the unusual prerequisite allowed students to realize just how attached they were to social media and the harmful extent of their addiction.

“It’s beautiful to meet people, to mix [and mingle]. This is one of the great results of the diaries that my students wrote last year,” Casetti said. “A number of them, during the 24 hours in which they avoided being connected [online], they wrote that they rediscovered the pleasure of reading a book, a physical book. That was fantastic … So I would say to be aware, to use a certain kind of moderation and to be able to discover the entire latitude of the pleasure and the affordances of life.”

Mental Health and Counseling has therapists available to work with students who feel that social media use is negatively impacting their mental health. 

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