Christchurch: In emergencies, people may trust robots too much for their own safety, a new study suggests. In a mock building fire, test subjects followed instructions from an “Emergency Guide Robot” even after the machine had proven itself unreliable – and after some participants were told that robot had broken down.

Washington: Populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic National Convention with a speech in which he called for a new currency standard based on silver rather than gold. Over the next few years, his “Cross of Gold” ideas spread across the country, with thousands upon thousands of newspaper mentions.

Washington: American University School of Communication’s Center for Media & Social Impact (CMSI) announces new research on the rise of the nationwide Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The study “Beyond the Hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice,” coauthored by AU Communications Professor Deen Freelon, examines how social media drove the biggest push for racial justice the US has seen in decades.

San Diego: A team of scientists is exploring an unusual source of electricity — damaged tomatoes that are unsuitable for sale at the grocery store. Their pilot project involves a biological-based fuel cell that uses tomato waste left over from harvests in Florida.

East Lansing: Cyber thieves who steal credit and debit card numbers are making millions of dollars in profits, fueling a global criminal enterprise marked by the high-profile data breaches of major companies such as Target and Home Depot.

Gravitational Waves (GW) were the last prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. The first direct detection of gravitational waves was announced on 11 February by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).