In 2018, the Australian philosopher Kate Manne coined the word 'himpathy' to describe what she called 'the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior'. This happened to former US President Donald Trump who was found liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll in 2023. Carroll faced abuse from online trolls, she received death threats and was driven from her home. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to a human behaviour expert whose research seeks to understand what makes some people more inclined to support perpetrators of sexual misconduct than the victims. Samantha Dodson is an assistant professor of organisational behaviour and human resources at the University of Calgary in Canada. She first started researching the ways people react to accusations of sexual misconduct around the time of the #MeToo movement, as women came forward with accusations of sexual harassment in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein case....

AIs are often described as 'black boxes' with researchers unable to to figure out how they 'think'. To better understand these often inscrutable systems, some scientists are borrowing from psychology and neuroscience to design tools to reverse-engineer them, which they hope will lead to the design of safer, more efficient AIs....

David Bau is very familiar with the idea that computer systems are becoming so complicated it's hard to keep track of how they operate. 'I spent 20 years as a software engineer, working on really complex systems. And there's always this problem,' says Bau, a computer scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. But with conventional software, someone with inside knowledge can usually deduce what's going on, Bau says. If a website's ranking drops in a Google search, for example, someone at Google ' where Bau worked for a dozen years ' will have a good idea why. 'Here's what really terrifies me' about the current breed of artificial intelligence (AI), he says: 'there is no such understanding', even among the people building it. The latest wave of AI relies heavily on machine learning, in which software identifies patterns in data on its own, without being given any predetermined rules as to how to organize or classify the information. These patterns can be inscrutable to humans. The most advanced machine-learning systems use neural networks: software inspired by the architecture of the brain. They simulate layers of neurons, which transform information as it passes from layer to layer. As in human brains, these networks strengthen and weaken neural connections as they learn, but it's hard to see why certain connections are affected. As a result, researchers often talk about AI as 'black boxes', the inner workings of which are a mystery....

While researchers know that space travel can stress space crew members both physically and mentally and test their ability to work together in close quarters, missions to Mars will amplify these challenges. Mars is far away ' millions of miles from Earth ' and a mission to the red planet will take two to two and a half years, between travel time and the Mars surface exploration itself. As a psychiatrist who has studied space crew member interactions in orbit, I'm interested in the stressors that will occur during a Mars mission and how to mitigate them for the benefit of future space travelers. Given the great distance to Mars, two-way communication between crew members and Earth will take about 25 minutes round trip. This delayed contact with home won't just hurt crew member morale. It will likely mean space crews won't get as much real-time help from Mission Control during onboard emergencies. Because these communications travel at the speed of light and can't go any faster, experts are coming up with ways to improve communication efficiency under time-delayed conditions. These solutions might include texting, periodically summarizing topics and encouraging participants to ask questions at the end of each message, which the responder can answer during the next message....