If you feel safer, you might take more risks – canceling out the benefits of various safety interventions. But educating people about this paradox and allowing for some personal choice might help.
Health guidelines can feel contradictory and hard to interpret. But a new star rating system should help consumers and policymakers better parse the evidence behind health risks and outcomes.
As the possibilities of the metaverse expand, it will occupy an increasing role in everyday life.
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As businesses establish themselves in the metaverse, the amount of financial transactions there will increase. This will come with previously unknown risks.
Dogs are seen as more likely to leap without looking – possibly a trait shared with their owners.
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A series of studies found that exposure to dogs leads people to make riskier financial decisions, while interactions with cats have the opposite effect.
We calculated there was a one in 1.4 billion chance of someone contracting vCJD from a blood transfusion. And that risk will get even smaller with time.
Before the pandemic, an intergenerational tea party wouldn’t have seemed a risky proposition.
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People want a simple answer. Is this action safe? But despite Anthony Fauci bouncing responsibility for COVID-19 risk assessment to individuals, your risk can’t be boiled down to one probability.
It is now up to individuals whether to wear masks in airports and other mass transit areas.
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Despite the halt to the federal mask mandate for mass transit, people may still choose to protect themselves. For those who do, the type of mask and how well it fits matter.
So much uncertainty around risk can make it extra hard to decide what to do.
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People tend to dislike uncertainty and risk – two things that are hard to avoid completely during a pandemic. That’s part of why it can feel especially draining to make even small decisions these days.
More than two years into the pandemic the world is a very different place. But this only partly explains different people’s responses to COVID.
Vaccination has allowed people to be more social again with much less risk of serious illness, but less cautious behaviors put people at an increased risk of catching the virus.
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Lisa Miller, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Calculating your risk of death or hospitalization if you are infected with the coronavirus requires good data – notably, the total number of infections in the US. Unfortunately, that data is fuzzy.
Tesla aims to show off a prototype humanoid robot as soon as next year.
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If you see the Tesla Bot as a joke or a harbinger of a dystopian future, you could be missing the real threat, which has more to do with Elon Musk’s power than robots run amok.
It can be hard to see eye to eye when people don’t see risk the same way.
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How you respond to a risk depends on how you weigh the costs and benefits of an action. The problem is you’re not just a logical computer, and emotions bias your interpretation of the facts.
It seems as though every other week there’s a study telling us coffee is good for us, or it’s bad for us. Here’s what to make of this new piece of research.
Climate change, in its impacts on our society, will have the capacity to destabilise and push social, political and economic systems to their limits. We will have to be bold.
Navigating risk can feel like walking on a tightrope, even when you’re perfectly safe.
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