https://phys.org/science-news/ en-us The latest science news on archaeology, fossils, mathematics, and science technology from Phys.org An interdisciplinary team of researchers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst have published work in the journal Science calling into question the conclusions of a widely reported study—published in Science in 2023—finding the social platform's algorithms successfully filtered out untrustworthy news surrounding the 2020 election and were not major drivers of misinformation. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-team-debunks-facebook-news-algorithm.html Social Sciences Political science Thu, 26 Sep 2024 14:00:01 EDT news646565823 New University of Otago—Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka research has uncovered the unlikely location of one of the earliest securely dated sites of sweet potato (kūmara) cultivation in Polynesia. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-unexpected-discovery-early-sweet-potato.html Archaeology Thu, 26 Sep 2024 12:06:14 EDT news646571170 The theory of indirect reciprocity holds that people who earn a good reputation by helping others are more likely to be rewarded by third parties, but widespread cooperation depends on agreement about reputations. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-method-sustain-social-cooperation.html Mathematics Social Sciences Thu, 26 Sep 2024 10:28:04 EDT news646565282 People around the globe often depend on informal financial arrangements, borrowing and lending money through social networks. Understanding this sheds light on local economies and helps fight poverty. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-social-people-money.html Social Sciences Economics & Business Thu, 26 Sep 2024 10:22:05 EDT news646564922 As a physicist and data scientist with a keen interest in gender inequality, Fariba Karimi was amazed to discover that the gender gap in physics has remained almost unchanged since 1900. As the citation and coauthorship networks in physics expand, women still make up a small proportion—and the gaps between male and female are getting larger in terms of absolute numbers. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-gender-gap-physics-stable-century.html Social Sciences Thu, 26 Sep 2024 09:43:04 EDT news646562582 Turn-taking dynamics of social interactions are important for speech and gesture synchronization, enabling conversations to proceed efficiently, according to a study published September 25, 2024, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Tifenn Fauviaux from the University of Montpellier, France, and colleagues. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-synchronization-social-interactions-conversations-cues.html Social Sciences Wed, 25 Sep 2024 14:00:01 EDT news646472265 The US House of Representatives is more likely to vote on climate action when it is linked with certain other environmental issues, according to a study published September 25, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate by Kayla Morton of the University of Washington, Seattle and colleagues. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-politicians-climate-action-linked-environmental.html Political science Wed, 25 Sep 2024 14:00:01 EDT news646474421 A multidisciplinary research team led by the Archaeometry research group of the University of Tübingen and the GEA research group of the University of Granada made a surprising discovery in the megalithic necropolis of Panoría (Granada, Spain): twice as many women as men were buried, a bias that is even more pronounced among the juvenile population, where the ratio is 10 females for every male. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-women-men-megalithic-necropolis-panora.html Archaeology Wed, 25 Sep 2024 11:50:02 EDT news646483801 Archaeologists have analyzed textiles from the ancient city of Huacas de Moche, Peru, showing how the population's cultural traditions survived in the face of external influence. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-year-textiles-reveal-cultural-resilience.html Archaeology Tue, 24 Sep 2024 12:40:01 EDT news646400045 Archaeologists analyzed thirteenth century BC bronze and flint arrowheads from the Tollense Valley, north-east Germany, uncovering the earliest evidence for large-scale interregional conflict in Europe. The Tollense Valley in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is well-known as the site of a large conflict dating to c. 1250 BC. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-archaeologists-southern-army-fought-europe.html Archaeology Tue, 24 Sep 2024 12:40:01 EDT news646400058 A small team of archaeologists at Yamagata University, working with a colleague from Université Paris, and a pair of AI researchers from the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, used an AI model to find more geoglyphs on the floor of Peru's Nazca Desert. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-archaeologists-ai-hundreds-geoglyphs-peru.html Archaeology Tue, 24 Sep 2024 10:29:37 EDT news646392570 Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words from each other with astonishing precision and speed. To find out how this is possible, a team of linguists has analyzed durations of consonants at different positions in words and utterances across a diverse sample of languages. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-word-consonants-systematically-lengthened-diverse.html Social Sciences Tue, 24 Sep 2024 05:00:01 EDT news646321981 Archaeological fieldwork in Morocco has discovered the earliest previously unknown farming society from a poorly understood period of northwest African prehistory. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-previously-unknown-neolithic-society-morocco.html Archaeology Mon, 23 Sep 2024 19:10:01 EDT news646321861 At the turn of the first millennium AD, an unknown group of people lived in the inland Isalo massif of southern Madagascar. Here, they built vast terraces and carved large stone chambers and small hollow rock niches. The architecture is unlike anything else found in Madagascar or the adjacent East African coast. Who built these structures, when they arrived, and why was unknown. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-enigmatic-archaeological-site-madagascar-built.html Archaeology Mon, 23 Sep 2024 10:30:01 EDT news646304356 Election polls often tighten up remarkably as the election date draws near. "Leave" (the European Union) won the UK election of May 2016 with a majority of 51.9%, but earlier the polls weren't nearly as tight—in January 2011 "Remain" was up by about 20 percentage points. In the 2020 presidential election in Poland, Andrzej Duda won with 51.0% of the votes, whereas he was up by about 5 percentage points just eight weeks earlier. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-large-electorates-tend-evenly-results.html Mathematics Political science Mon, 23 Sep 2024 10:00:01 EDT news646304327 Homicide is a leading cause of death among people 19 and younger in the United States, and firearms are used in a large proportion of these crimes. Although the homicide rate for this population declined in the 1990s and 2000s, it has increased every year since 2013, with a large spike during the COVID-19 pandemic. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-family-members-common-perpetrators-infant.html Social Sciences Political science Mon, 23 Sep 2024 09:34:14 EDT news646302851 When given the choice, people prefer to collaborate on work projects with higher-paid colleagues, but they want to hire subordinates with a lower pay history than theirs, according to research published in the journal American Psychologist. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-high-pay.html Social Sciences Economics & Business Mon, 23 Sep 2024 09:00:01 EDT news646300021 As anyone who's spent time in the saddle knows, riding a horse can be hard on your body. But can it change the way your skeleton looks? https://phys.org/news/2024-09-scientists-explore-horseback-human-skeletons.html Archaeology Sun, 22 Sep 2024 07:06:23 EDT news646207570 This week, researchers reported an effective way to protect working dogs from heat stress: training them to dunk their heads in cool water. A new computational technique provided a breakthrough in understanding the so-called "pseudogap" in quantum physics, a development that could lead to room-temperature superconductivity. And a bunch of scientists agree: Evidence now supports global action to combat microplastics. And a few other things happened, too. Among them: https://phys.org/news/2024-09-saturday-citations-football-metaphors-physics.html Other Sat, 21 Sep 2024 07:30:02 EDT news646053484 A new way of looking at tooth enamel could give scientists a path to deeper understanding of the health of human populations, from the ancient to the modern. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-proteins-tooth-enamel-window-ancient.html Archaeology Thu, 19 Sep 2024 15:07:04 EDT news645977221 Overall, Matthew Burnett's medical school experience has been wonderful. But the fourth-year medical student at A.T. Still University Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine understands his experience does not represent all medical students. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-mindset-key-medical-students-alarming.html Social Sciences Education Thu, 19 Sep 2024 12:07:20 EDT news645966436 A team of researchers from the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) have analyzed human remains from the Oakhurst rock shelter in southernmost Africa and reconstructed the genomes of thirteen individuals, who died between 1,300 and 10,000 years ago, including the oldest human genome from South Africa to date. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-year-human-dna-insights-south.html Archaeology Thu, 19 Sep 2024 12:06:16 EDT news645966373 Conservative voters have slightly larger amygdalas than progressive voters—by about the size of a sesame seed. In a replication study published September 19 in the journal iScience, researchers revisited the idea that progressive and conservative voters have identifiable differences in brain morphology, but with a 10x larger and more diverse sample size than the original study. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-political-ideology-differences-brain-previously.html Political science Thu, 19 Sep 2024 11:00:01 EDT news645954721 As income inequality widens, debates around redistribution policies are heating up. New research from the Universities of Zurich, Lille and Copenhagen reveals that support for these policies stems not only from individuals' financial situations but also from an inherent aversion to inequality. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-aversion-inequality-redistribution-policies.html Social Sciences Economics & Business Thu, 19 Sep 2024 10:17:03 EDT news645959822 When making economic decisions, humans can be driven by various factors, including their goals and emotions. Past studies have hypothesized that emotions play a crucial role in economic decisions, particularly those that involve risk or trade-offs between immediate and future benefits. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-relationship-emotions-economic-decision-differ.html Social Sciences Economics & Business Thu, 19 Sep 2024 09:49:38 EDT news645958172 Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. remain near all-time highs. Analysts say this disparity is a "major issue of our time." Experts have spotlighted deep policy failures fueling the problem and helpful economic fixes to alleviate the suffering. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-toddlers-bias-wealth.html Social Sciences Economics & Business Wed, 18 Sep 2024 17:05:04 EDT news645897901 Sharing stories over a cup of coffee; dancing in a group; cheering a football game in a crowd: these everyday rituals are among many different types of shared experiences that help humans develop social cohesion. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-synchronous-movements-social-bonds.html Social Sciences Wed, 18 Sep 2024 15:10:18 EDT news645891015 A mysterious tusked animal depicted in South African rock art might portray an ancient species preserved as fossils in the same region, according to a study published September 18, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Julien Benoit of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-south-african-art-possibly-extinct.html Archaeology Wed, 18 Sep 2024 14:00:02 EDT news645867781 Jamestown, Virginia, was founded in 1607 and was the first English permanent settlement in America. It has been the subject of many archaeological and historical analyses, including a recent study by Prof. Markus M. Key and Rebecca K. Rossi, which set out to determine the provenance of Jamestown's black "marble" knight's tombstone. What they determined was unexpected, says Prof. Key. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-reveals-america-oldest-tombstone-belgium.html Archaeology Wed, 18 Sep 2024 07:40:01 EDT news645784785 People selectively underestimate how rich the world's richest people are, according to a study. Increasing income inequality in many countries is driven by steep gains among the top 1% of earners. In the United States, support for policies that would redistribute wealth has not increased since the 1970s, even as the share of incomes held by the top 1% of Americans jumped from 10% to 19%. https://phys.org/news/2024-09-people-underestimate-income.html Economics & Business Political science Tue, 17 Sep 2024 12:44:50 EDT news645795886