https://phys.org/science-news/ en-us The latest science news on archaeology, fossils, mathematics, and science technology from Phys.org Ancient stone tools found in western Ukraine may be the oldest known evidence of early human presence in Europe, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-ancient-stone-tools-ukraine-date.html Archaeology Wed, 06 Mar 2024 14:30:36 EST news628957816 Hate speech incidents are widespread in all areas of society and are often unchallenged by uninvolved bystanders. LMU researchers have investigated what significance the reactions of bystanders to verbal hate attacks have for the formation of social norms. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-responsibility.html Social Sciences Political science Wed, 06 Mar 2024 12:31:33 EST news628950688 Archaeologists have analyzed chemical residues from ceramic vases at the city of Cotzumalhuapa, Guatemala, revealing physical evidence of tobacco use in Mesoamerica, likely for ritual and therapeutic purposes. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-ancient-mesoamericans-drunk-tobacco-rituals.html Archaeology Tue, 05 Mar 2024 12:11:03 EST news628863061 A new study from the Nihewan basin of China has revealed that hominins who possessed advanced knapping abilities equivalent to Mode 2 technological features occupied East Asia as early as 1.1 million years ago (Ma), which is 0.3 Ma earlier than the date associated with the first handaxes found in East Asia. This suggests that Mode 2 hominins dispersed into East Asia much earlier than previously thought. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-timeline-east-asian-hominins-tool.html Archaeology Tue, 05 Mar 2024 11:22:49 EST news628860167 Seemingly overnight, a yoga studio replaces a barbershop, a coffee café takes over a small grocery, and a multi-story apartment building looms where older single-family homes once stood. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-ai-images-visual-indicators-gentrification.html Social Sciences Economics & Business Tue, 05 Mar 2024 10:37:39 EST news628857453 Science is one of the most highly regarded institutions in America, with nearly three-quarters of the public expressing "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of confidence in scientists. But confidence in science has nonetheless declined over the past few years, since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it has for most other major social institutions. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-science-high-scientists-adherence-norms.html Social Sciences Political science Mon, 04 Mar 2024 17:16:04 EST news628794961 In the complicated world of human interactions, helping others can come back around, a concept known as indirect reciprocity. It's like a societal credit score, where one's good deeds build up a good reputation, prompting others to return the favor in the future. But what if this credit score wasn't just a single individual's but shared with a group they're associated with? https://phys.org/news/2024-03-reputation-indirect-reciprocity-affect-cooperative.html Social Sciences Mon, 04 Mar 2024 09:17:33 EST news628766250 The identification of an eleventh-century Islamic astrolabe bearing both Arabic and Hebrew inscriptions makes it one of the oldest examples ever discovered and one of only a handful known in the world. The astronomical instrument was adapted, translated, and corrected for centuries by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian users in Spain, North Africa, and Italy. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-rare-eleventh-century-astrolabe-discovery.html Archaeology Sun, 03 Mar 2024 19:00:01 EST news628516526 It's been a long, eight-day leap week, and this weekend, I'm spending my free time working on the manuscript for my style guide for science writers, "How to Effectively Split an Infinitive." https://phys.org/news/2024-03-saturday-citations-wont-black-hole.html Other Sat, 02 Mar 2024 09:10:04 EST news628517216 Is it possible to deduce the shape of a drum from the sounds it makes? This is the kind of question that Iosif Polterovich, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Université de Montréal, likes to ask. Polterovich uses spectral geometry, a branch of mathematics, to understand physical phenomena involving wave propagation. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-mathematicians-plya-conjecture-eigenvalues-disk.html Mathematics Fri, 01 Mar 2024 10:54:19 EST news628512858 Suppose two speakers of the same language are playing a guessing game where each has the same color swatches, and Player 1 tries to get Player 2 to guess a hue by naming the color. If the second player consistently guesses correctly as often as possible, that indicates their language has an efficient color naming system. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-role-history-efficient-evolve.html Social Sciences Fri, 01 Mar 2024 06:42:03 EST news628497721 New York City ranks in the top 15% safest of more than 800 U.S. cities, according to a pioneering new analysis from researchers at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, suggesting the effectiveness of the city's efforts to mitigate homicides there. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-york-city-safest-big-cities.html Social Sciences Political science Thu, 29 Feb 2024 16:02:50 EST news628444965 If we could stand in a landscape that our Mesolithic ancestors called home, what would we see around us? Scientists have devised a method of analyzing preserved hazelnut shells to tell us whether the microhabitats around archaeological sites were heavily forested or open and pasture-like. This could help us understand not only what a local environment looked like thousands of years ago, but how humans have impacted their habitats over time. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-wood-trees-archaeologists-hazelnuts-reconstruct.html Archaeology Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:02 EST news628356149 Thousands of historic and archaeological sites in Georgia are at risk from tropical storm surges, and that number will increase with climate change, according to a study published in PLOS ONE by Matthew D. Howland and Victor D. Thompson of Wichita State University and the University of Georgia. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-climate-threatens-thousands-archaeological-sites.html Archaeology Wed, 28 Feb 2024 14:00:01 EST news628326283 Think before you click. That's the advice from Alexander Stewart, Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St Andrews, whose research indicates inattentive readers are more likely to click on a false news story, with misinformation content producers exploiting this attention gap. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-attention-lapses-exploited-fake-news.html Social Sciences Political science Wed, 28 Feb 2024 10:23:40 EST news628338217 Potters of different cultural backgrounds learn new types differently, producing cultural differences even in the absence of differential cultural evolution. Kobe University-led research, published in PNAS Nexus, has implications for how we evaluate the difference of archaeological artifacts across cultures. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-captures-pottery-culturally-distinct.html Archaeology Social Sciences Wed, 28 Feb 2024 08:35:03 EST news628331701 Blood relations and kinship were not all-important for the way hunter-gatherer communities lived during the Stone Age in Western Europe. A new genetic study, conducted at several well-known French Stone Age burial sites, shows that several distinct families lived together. This was probably a deliberate system for avoiding inbreeding. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-genetic-stone-age-strategy-inbreeding.html Archaeology Wed, 28 Feb 2024 07:02:15 EST news628326130 The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from different cultures. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-pythagoras-wrong-universal-musical-harmonies.html Mathematics Social Sciences Tue, 27 Feb 2024 11:31:20 EST news628255860 People living in ancient Eastern Arabia appear to have developed resistance to malaria following the appearance of agriculture in the region around five thousand years ago, a new study reveals. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-dna-ancient-eastern-arabians-reveals.html Archaeology Tue, 27 Feb 2024 11:00:01 EST news628247442 Three years ago, the stock price of the company GameStop soared over 1,625% in just a week. While it's been speculated the primary cause was unprecedented, organized action among Reddit users using a trading strategy known as a "short squeeze," researchers have now definitively shown a causal relationship between activity on Reddit and the wild market phenomenon. They have published their findings on the pre-print server arXiv. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-reddit-users-famous-gamestop-short.html Economics & Business Tue, 27 Feb 2024 10:00:01 EST news628247506 Early hunter–gatherers from the Middle Stone Age in southern Africa were selecting the most suitable material available for stone tools and spearheads more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study by Dr. Patrick Schmidt from the University of Tübingen's Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology section. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-physical-quantify-quality-stones-tools.html Archaeology Tue, 27 Feb 2024 09:28:01 EST news628248478 Human coexistence depends on cooperation. Individuals have different motivations and reasons to collaborate, resulting in social dilemmas, such as the well-known prisoner's dilemma. Scientists from the Chatterjee group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) now present a new mathematical principle that helps to understand the cooperation of individuals with different characteristics. The results, published in PNAS, can be applied to economics or behavioral studies. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-math-social-dilemmas.html Mathematics Social Sciences Mon, 26 Feb 2024 15:00:02 EST news628159474 Inequality among people has become an increasingly salient issue globally, with data indicating a rise in inequality levels across many countries in recent years. This, in turn, has generated concerns both from the perspective of the sustainability of economic growth, as well as from the perspective of social cohesion and well-being. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-economic-metrics-gini-index-big.html Social Sciences Economics & Business Mon, 26 Feb 2024 14:03:57 EST news628178628 Research conducted by scientists from IIASA and Princeton University suggests that a combination of insurance subsidies and policies that promote "prosocial preferences"―decision-making preferences that account for community well-being―can help facilitate optimal climate risk management and reduce economic losses. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-prosocial-smallholder-farming-communities-climate.html Social Sciences Economics & Business Mon, 26 Feb 2024 13:02:03 EST news628174921 Gamers who chose to be good Samaritans while playing through a zombie apocalypse were more likely to be prosocial post-game, according to new QUT research. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-video-game-rewards-reveals-gamer.html Social Sciences Mon, 26 Feb 2024 12:19:10 EST news628172347 The enigmatic Philistine culture, which flourished during the Iron Age (ca. 1200–604 BCE), profoundly affected the southern Levant's cultural history, agronomy, and dietary customs. More than a quarter century of excavations at Tell es-Safi/Gath in central Israel, identified as the biblical Gath of the Philistines and the home of Goliath, has provided a unique window into the world of this ancient civilization. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-seed-fruit-analysis-biblical-home.html Archaeology Mon, 26 Feb 2024 11:53:03 EST news628170781 The average researcher thinks they are better than their colleagues at following good research practice. They also think that their own research field is better than other research fields at following good research practice. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-overestimate-honesty.html Social Sciences Mon, 26 Feb 2024 10:42:24 EST news628166542 From enraptured voles and space robots on the moon to brain gears and dense objects, it was a heck of a week in science. Let's take a look at some of the most interesting developments over the past seven days. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-saturday-citations-neurology-pair-bonding.html Other Sat, 24 Feb 2024 08:30:01 EST news627913365 A new study has revealed that employees who are more mindful in the digital workplace are better protected against stress, anxiety and overload. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-mindfulness-stress-burnout.html Social Sciences Economics & Business Fri, 23 Feb 2024 14:00:01 EST news627905009 From smart virtual assistants and self-driving cars to digital health and fraud prevention systems, AI technology is transforming almost every aspect of our daily lives—and education is no different. For all its promise, the rise of AI, like any new technology, raises some pressing ethical and equity questions. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-robot-friend-ai-accessible.html Education Fri, 23 Feb 2024 13:21:57 EST news627916913