Developed by US company OpenAI, ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm, winning 100 million users since it came out in November 2022. People can ask the robot to write stories and emails, create instructions for cooking a certain food, translate languages, and answer all kinds of questions. In its own words, it is "a language model trained in a large amount of internet text to help users get human-like text."

Compared with Siri or other chatbots, ChatGPT uses a much bigger information center for training. It also uses stronger software (软件) and hardware to learn things by itself. For example, if it provides a wrong answer to your question, you can tell it the right one and it will correct itself. "It's a totally different chatbot," computer scientist Liu Xiaoguang from Nankai University told Tianjin Daily. "The knowledge level ChatGPT shows is the same as a university student. That's why it shocked the world."

But one big problem with ChatGPT is that it makes mistakes or even gives false information. When Rezza, a 28-year-old from Indonesia, used the robot to write an essay (论文), it "gave out many examples which other writers actually hadn't mentioned at all", he told The Guardian. Since the robot is trained using words from the internet, it can also pick up biases (偏见) about certain groups. These are all things that need to be dealt with.

Science shows why we trust people who are confident. Imagine this: one person tells a lie confidently, while another says something true in a hesitant voice. Which person would you trust?

According to British scientist Dean Burnett, humans are far more likely to believe information expressed confidently by a confident person or in some other ways using confident language. "Humans trusting confident people over those who are more uncertain is a known thing," wrote Burnett for Science Focus magazine. "When two people are trying to make a decision but each person says different things, confidently expressed arguments are seen as passing on better information, which decides the decision."

Why is this the case? As Burnett said, humans are social animals. In our ancient past, most of our information about the world came from our tribe(部落), in other words, the people around us. So, if ancient humans heard someone confidently saying "There's a tiger coming" , believing what that person said could save our lives.

On a more personal level, we use our own experiences to understand what other people do and say. That's how our brain works. When we are confident, it's for good reason. Therefore , we believe that when someone else is being confident, they must have good reason, too.

However, we need to realize that confidently expressed information may be more persuasive(有说服力的), but that doesn't mean it's correct. As Burnett wrote, we are living in a more and more different world. Trusting very confident people without checking the facts can lead to "unexpected results".

Some animals can easily find their way home after a long journey. How do they make it? Scientific research shows that they are born with certain unusual abilities for direction.

A certain kind of ants, for example, can count their steps to avoid getting lost. They can go as far as 110 metres and bring food home. These ants live in the open desert (沙漠), so they have nothing to guide them along the way. It's like someone walking six kilometres through a dark forest.

Some fish have an unbelievable sense of smell. They can smell even a single drop of their home water in a large sea area. Some sea birds have a similar ability. They are able to make a smell map of their flying area.

Some animals can sense the earth's magnetic field (磁场), while humans can't. This magnetic field guides a certain kind of fish when the swim a long way to a place and then back. How can this kind of fish do that? It is still a____mystery. Scientists have no good answers yet.

However, animals with such unusual abilities still have difficulty dealing with environmental changes caused by human activities. For example, many birds depend on stars for direction, but they get lost easily a night when city lights are kept on all night. To solve this problem, we can simply turn off some lights at night. Clearly, one small act of humans may mean a lot to animals.