News bits

Cat Walks Across France to Their Old Home Before Being 

Reunited With ‘Stunned’ Owners 13 Months Later

A cat traveled more than 280 miles to its old home before being reunited with her relocated owners and taken back to her new home—a whopping 13 months later. Laëtitia De Amicis moved with her family and their three cats because of work reasons a year ago, leaving the Orne region of France. The family took great care at their new location in Normandy, to keep Felys, Crapaud, and Cocci, inside the house, because they were worried they’d get lost in different surroundings. But Cocci went missing in August 2021. The worried family with two teenage children had searched for Cocci for three months, with no luck.

Cocci

Mindfulness Program Shown to Be as Effective as 

Antidepressant Drug for Treating Anxiety Disorders

A guided mindfulness-based stress reduction program was as effective as using ‘the gold-standard’ antidepressant drug—escitalopram—for patients with anxiety disorders, according to a first-of-its-kind, randomized clinical trial from Georgetown University Medical Center.

Drugs that are currently prescribed for the disorders can be very effective—but many patients either have difficulty getting them, do not respond to them, or find the side effects (including nausea, sexual dysfunction, and drowsiness) a barrier to consistent treatment.

Standardized mindfulness-based interventions, such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), can decrease anxiety, but prior to this study, the interventions had not been studied in comparison to effective anti-anxiety drugs.

The degree of anxiety decreased about 30% in both the drug-treated group (106 patients) and the MBSR group (102 patients). The usual caution applies to this research. This is the first study like this. It was small, with only 208 patients that completed the study who could be evaluated. Therefore, this clinical trial needs to be repeated to verify this result. If the result is real, this could be a pretty big deal.

Misinformation Experiment Has Potential to 

‘Inoculate’ Millions of Social Media Users

Briefly exposing social media users to the tricks behind misinformation boosts awareness of harmful online falsehoods, says new research—and Google is set to deploy an anti-disinformation campaign based on the findings.

Short animations placed in YouTube’s Ad slot gave viewers a taste of the strategies behind misinformation, according to the huge online experiment led by the University of Cambridge.

Working with Jigsaw, a unit within Google dedicated to tackling threats to open societies, a team of psychologists from the universities of Cambridge and Bristol created 90-second clips designed to familiarize users with manipulation techniques such as scapegoating and deliberate incoherence.

This “pre-bunking” strategy preemptively exposes people to tropes at the root of malicious propaganda, so they can better identify falsehoods online—regardless of subject matter.

Researchers behind the Inoculation Science project compare it to a vaccine: by giving people a “micro-dose” of misinformation in advance, it helps prevent them falling for it in future — an idea based on what social psychologist’s call “inoculation theory.”

The findings, published in Science Advances, come from seven experiments involving a total of almost 30,000 participants—including the first “real world field study” of inoculation theory on a social media platform.

If this really works as the data suggests, it could be a huge deal. One can see divisive, polarizing online disinformation, lies and slanders and dirty mental tricks as an existential threat to modern civilization. The logic is pretty simple: People who are polarized, distrustful and deceived tend to become more extreme. They tend to be less willing to compromise and tolerate opposition and opposing views. That discord and distrust tends to increase the odds of conflict. Conflict increases the odds of conflict getting out of hand. That increases the odds of civilization collapse after a major war or failure to deal with a major problem, e.g., climate change.

By Germaine: The bringer of good news