The Best of PLOS
10+ most popular PLOS articles, as voted by our community.
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PLOS on Conspiracy Theories
Have beliefs in conspiracy theories increased over time?
The public is convinced that beliefs in conspiracy theories are increasing, and many scholars, journalists, and policymakers agree. Given the associations between conspiracy theories and many non…
PLOS on Future Of Work
An adversarial collaboration protocol for testing contrasting predictions of global neuronal workspace and integrated information theory
The relationship between conscious experience and brain activity has intrigued scientists and philosophers for centuries. In the last decades, several theories have suggested different accounts for…
PLOS on Nature
Bonobos Share with Strangers
Humans are thought to possess a unique proclivity to share with others – including strangers. This puzzling phenomenon has led many to suggest that sharing with strangers originates from human-unique…
Chimpanzees Help Each Other upon Request
Background The evolution of altruism has been explained mainly from ultimate perspectives. However, it remains to be investigated from a proximate point of view how and in which situations such social…
PLOS on Psychology
Personality variation is eroded by simple social behaviours in collective foragers
Author summary The movement of groups can be heavily influenced by ‘leader’ individuals who differ from the others in some way. A major source of differences between individuals is the repeatability…
PLOS on Sleep
Recommendations for daytime, evening, and nighttime indoor light exposure to best support physiology, sleep, and wakefulness in…
Light exposure influences human health and wellbeing by modulating circadian rhythms and sleep. This Consensus View outlines the first expert scientific consensus recommendations for appropriate daily…
Sleep prevents catastrophic forgetting in spiking neural networks by forming a joint synaptic weight representation
Author summary Artificial neural networks can achieve superhuman performance in many domains. Despite these advances, these networks fail in sequential learning; they achieve optimal performance on…
«the brain learns continuously, and typically learns best when new training is interleaved with periods of sleep for memory consolidation.»
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Predicting dementia from spontaneous speech using large language models
Author summary Alzheimer’s disease is a currently incurable brain disorder. Speech, a quintessentially human ability, has emerged as an important biomarker of neurodegenerative disorders like AD. Can…
Hangry in the field: An experience sampling study on the impact of hunger on anger, irritability, and…
The colloquial term “hangry” refers to the notion that people become angry when hungry, but very little research has directly determined the extent to which the relationship between hunger and…
Intact but empty forests? Patterns of hunting-induced mammal defaunation in the tropics
This study estimates that roughly half of the tropics contain defaunated populations of medium and large mammal species as a result of hunting pressure; hunting effects are so pervasive that even…
Tyrant Dinosaur Evolution Tracks the Rise and Fall of Late Cretaceous Oceans
The Late Cretaceous (∼95–66 million years ago) western North American landmass of Laramidia displayed heightened non-marine vertebrate diversity and intracontinental regionalism relative to other…
Airbnb and neighborhood crime: The incursion of tourists or the erosion of local social dynamics?
The proliferation of internet-based home-sharing platforms like Airbnb has raised heated debates, with many in the general public believing that the presence of Airbnb listings can lead to an increase…
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