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1. The Weird and Wonderful World of Worms

   https://doi.org/10.3389/frym.2022.902248  

   Gadeken, Kara J.; Kiskaddon, Erin; Moore, Jenna M.; Dorgan, Kelly M. (November 2022, Frontiers for Young Minds)

   Animals with long, skinny bodies are often called “worms,” but there are many kinds of worms—even in the ocean. Annelids (segmented worms) include garden earthworms, but their ocean relatives come in many colors, shapes, and sizes. Some are so small that they live between grains of sand, while others can be longer than a human and eat fish! Marine worms are essential to the ocean food web, as both predators and prey. They help create homes for plants and animals by burrowing and building tubes in ocean sediments. Scientists are still discovering new worm species, and there are still many mysteries about how worms eat, why they live in the places they do, and what roles they play in ocean ecosystems. Worms are a fascinating and important part of ocean communities. 

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2. This One Weird Trick Gets Users to Stop Clicking on Clickbait

   https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2025.2464890  

   Shrestha, Ankit; Behfar, Arezou; Seng, Sovantharith; Wright, Matthew; Al-Ameen, Mahdi Nasrullah (March 2025, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction)
3. Morality beyond the WEIRD: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures.

   https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000470  

   Atari, Mohammad; Haidt, Jonathan; Graham, Jesse; Koleva, Sena; Stevens, Sean T; Dehghani, Morteza (November 2023, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)
4. Designing our Weird Social XR Future: Tactics to support hybrid ways of embodied knowing

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3686169.3686199  

   McVeigh-Schultz, Joshua; Márquez_Segura, Elena; Isbister, Katherine (October 2024, ACM)
5. The Case for “Weird Social” in VR/XR: A Vision of Social Superpowers Beyond Meatspace

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3450377  

   McVeigh-Schultz, Joshua; Isbister, Katherine (May 2021, CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   COVID underscores the potential of VR meeting tools to compensate for lack of embodied communication in applications like Zoom. But both research and commercial VR meeting environments typically seek to approximate physical meetings, instead of exploring new capacities of communication and coordination. We argue the most transformative features of VR (and XR more broadly) may look and feel very different from familiar social rituals of physical meetings. Embracing “weird” forms of sociality and embodiment, we incorporate inspiration from a range of sources including: (1) emerging rituals in commercial social VR, (2) existing research on social augmentation systems for meetings, (3) novel examples of embodied VR communication, and (4) a fictionalized vignette envisioning a future with aspects of “Weird Social XR” folded into everyday life. We call upon the research community to approach these speculative forms of alien sociality as opportunities to explore new kinds of social superpowers. 

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