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b'Why Do Humans Anthropomorphize AI?\\nArtificial intelligence has become more sophisticated in a short period of time. Even though we may understand that when ChatGPT spits out a response, there\\u2019s no human behind the screen, we can\\u2019t help but anthropomorphize\\u2014imagining that the AI has a personality, thoughts, or feelings.\\nHow exactly should we understand the bond between humans and artificial intelligence?\\nGuest host Sophie Bushwick talks to Dr. David Gunkel, professor of media studies at Northern Illinois University, to explore the ways in which humans and artificial intelligence form emotional connections.\\n\\n\\xa0\\nA Bee\\u2019s Eye View Of Cities\\u2019 Microbiomes\\nWhen you want to look at the microbial health of a city, there are a variety of ways to go about it. You might look at medical records, or air quality. In recent years, samples of wastewater have been used to track COVID outbreaks. Studies of urban subway systems have involved painstaking swabs of patches of subway muck. But now, researchers are offering another approach to sample a city\\u2019s environment\\u2014its beehives.\\nA report recently published in the journal Environmental Microbiome used the bees foraging in a city to provide information about the town\\u2019s bacteria and fungi. The researchers found that by looking at the debris in the bottom of a beehive, they could learn about some of the environments in the blocks around the hives. The microbes they collected weren\\u2019t just species associated with flowers and plant life, but included organisms associated with ponds and dogs.\\xa0The team found that the hive samples could reveal changes from one neighborhood to another in a city, and in the microbial differences between different cities\\u2014samples taken in Venice, for instance, contained signals associated with rotting wood that were not seen in samples from Tokyo.\\nElizabeth Henaff, an assistant professor in the NYU Tandon School of Engineering at New York University and a co-author of the report, joins SciFri\\u2019s Kathleen Davis to talk about what bees and microbes can tell us about the cities we share.\\n\\n\\xa0\\nThis Is Your Brain On Words\\nWhat happens after you pick up a book, or pull up some text on your phone?\\nWhat occurs between the written words hitting your eyes and your brain understanding what they represent?\\nScientists are trying to better understand how the brain processes written information\\u2014and how a primate brain that evolved to make sense of twisty branches and forking streams adapted to comprehend a written alphabet.\\nResearchers used electrodes implanted in the brains of patients being evaluated for epilepsy treatment to study what parts of the brain were involved when those patients read words and sentences. They found that two different parts of the brain are activated, and interact in different ways when you read a simple list of unrelated words, compared to when you encounter a series of words that builds up a more complex idea.\\nDr. Nitin Tandon, a professor of neurosurgery at UTHealth Houston and one of the authors of a report on the work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, joins guest host Sophie Bushwick to talk about the study, and what scientists are learning about how the brain allows us to read.\\n\\n\\xa0\\nTranscripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on\\xa0sciencefriday.com.'