Two pieces of iron armor — reportedly first found in the desert of West Texas about 150 years ago — have recently been analyzed by scientists in Nebraska, where the artifacts have been sitting for decades in museum storage.... Read more »
Bleed, P., Long, L., Long, J., Roberg, M., & Killick, D. (2015) Scale armor on the North American frontier: Lessons from the John G. Bourke armor. Plains Anthropologist, 60(235), 199-222. DOI: 10.1179/2052546X15Y.0000000001
A multinational team of scientists have sifted through cells of vastly different organisms, from amoebae to worms to mice to humans, to reveal how proteins fit together to build different cells and bodies. This tour de force of protein science, a result of a collaboration between seven research groups from three countries, led by Professor Andrew Emili from the University of Toronto’s Donnelly Centre, uncovered tens of thousands of new protein interactions, accounting for about a quarter of all estimated protein contacts in a cell.... Read more »
Wan, C., Borgeson, B., Phanse, S., Tu, F., Drew, K., Clark, G., Xiong, X., Kagan, O., Kwan, J., Bezginov, A.... (2015) Panorama of ancient metazoan macromolecular complexes. Nature. DOI: 10.1038/nature14877
Just like attempts at influencing hairstyles or clothing can backfire, adults who try to guilt middle-schoolers into exercising won’t get them to be any more active. The study found students who don’t feel in control of their exercise choices or who feel pressured by adults to be more active typically aren’t.... Read more »
DISHMAN, R., MCIVER, K., DOWDA, M., SAUNDERS, R., & PATE, R. (2015) Motivation and Behavioral Regulation of Physical Activity in Middle School Students. Medicine , 47(9), 1913-1921. DOI: 10.1249/MSS.0000000000000616
One of my goals in teaching is to introduce students to how we come to know things in biological anthropology, and lab activities give students hands-on experience in using scientific approaches to address research questions. Biological anthropology (really, all biology) is about understanding variation, and I’ve created some labs for students to scrutinize biological variation within the classroom. In my Introduction class, the first aspect of […]... Read more »
Bartholomeusz, H., Courchesne, E., & Karns, C. (2002) Relationship Between Head Circumference and Brain Volume in Healthy Normal Toddlers, Children, and Adults. Neuropediatrics, 33(5), 239-241. DOI: 10.1055/s-2002-36735
“Gaydar” — the purported ability to infer whether people are gay or straight based on their appearance — seemed to get a scientific boost from a 2008 study that concluded people could accurately guess someone’s sexual orientation based on photographs of their faces. In a new paper researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison challenge what they call “the gaydar myth.” William Cox, an assistant scientist in the Department of Psychology and the lead author, says gaydar isn’t accurate and is actually a harmful form of stereotyping.... Read more »
Cox, W., Devine, P., Bischmann, A., & Hyde, J. (2015) Inferences About Sexual Orientation: The Roles of Stereotypes, Faces, and The Gaydar Myth. The Journal of Sex Research, 1-15. DOI: 10.1080/00224499.2015.1015714
It is the first week of school here at Michigan State University, and not surprisingly, we’ve got super high temperatures and crazy humidity. It feels like you’re entering a steam […]... Read more »
G. ZOËGA AND K. A. MURPHY. (2015) Life on the Edge of the Arctic: The Bioarchaeology of the Keldudalur Cemetery in Skagafjörður, Iceland. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. info:/
The world might seem a little grayer than usual when we’re down in the dumps and we often talk about “feeling blue” — new research suggests that the associations we make between emotion and color go beyond mere metaphor. The results of two studies indicate that feeling sadness may actually change how we perceive color. Specifically, researchers found that participants who were induced to feel sad were less accurate in identifying colors on the blue-yellow axis than those who were led to feel amused or emotionally neutral.... Read more »
Parents go to great lengths to ensure the health and well-being of their developing offspring. The favor, however, may not always be returned. Dramatic research has shown that during pregnancy, cells of the fetus often migrate through the placenta, taking up residence in many areas of the mother’s body, where their influence may benefit or undermine maternal health.... Read more »
Boddy, A., Fortunato, A., Wilson Sayres, M., & Aktipis, A. (2015) Fetal microchimerism and maternal health: A review and evolutionary analysis of cooperation and conflict beyond the womb. BioEssays. DOI: 10.1002/bies.201500059
To understand how confidence in parenting may predict parenting behaviors in women who were abused as children, psychologists have found that mothers who experienced more types of maltreatment as children are more critical of their ability to parent successfully. Intervention programs for moms at-risk, therefore, should focus on bolstering mothers’ self-confidence–not just teach parenting skills, the researchers said.... Read more »
Michl, L., Handley, E., Rogosch, F., Cicchetti, D., & Toth, S. (2015) Self-Criticism as a Mechanism Linking Childhood Maltreatment and Maternal Efficacy Beliefs in Low-Income Mothers With and Without Depression. Child Maltreatment. DOI: 10.1177/1077559515602095
Researchers have revealed that HIV does not cause AIDS by the virus’s direct effect on the host’s immune cells, but rather through the cells’ lethal influence on one another. HIV can either be spread through free-floating virus that directly infect the host immune cells or an infected cell can pass the virus to an uninfected cell.... Read more »
Nicole L.K. Galloway et. al. (2015) Cell-to-Cell Transmission of HIV-1 Is Required to Trigger Pyroptotic Death of Lymphoid-Tissue-Derived CD4 T Cells. Cell Reports. DOI: http://dx.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2015.08.011
by Laura Smith-Khan in Language on the Move
When people arrive in countries like Australia, seeking to be recognised as refugees and offered protection, it is obviously important that they are able to communicate their experiences and respond to any doubts the authorities may have about their claims. … Continue reading →... Read more »
Crock, M. . (2011) Immigration, Refugees and Forced Migration: Law, policy and practice in Australia. Annandale: The Federation Press. info:/
Murderers who kill intimate partners and family members have a significantly different psychological and forensic profile from murderers who kill people they don’t know, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study that examined the demographics, psychiatric history and neuropsychology of these individuals.... Read more »
West-Smith, M. (2014) Book Review: Survived by one: The life and mind of a family mass murderer. Criminal Justice Review, 39(2), 222-224. DOI: 10.1177/0734016814523119
It's a question that many people struggle with and has great implications for the study of our species: are men and women more alike than different or more different than alike, and what differences exist between the sexes?... Read more »
If men take up more of the child-care duties, splitting them equally with their female partners, heterosexual couples have more satisfaction with their relationships and their sex lives, according to new research by sociologists. The group used data from more than 900 heterosexual couples’ responses in the 2006 Marital Relationship Study (MARS).... Read more »
Daniel Fowler et al. (2015) Couples That Split Childcare Duties Have Higher Quality Relationships and Sex Lives . American Sociological Association. info:other/Link
Some of the more colorful ideas and text in the anthropological literature are courtesy of Raymond Dart. In 1925, Dart identified the Taung fossil as a close relative of humans, and coined the scientific name, Australopithecus africanus. This was a pretty good idea, as Taung was the first in what is now a large collection of fossils attributed to this […]... Read more »
DART, R. (1925) Australopithecus africanus: The Man-Ape of South Africa. Nature, 115(2884), 195-199. DOI: 10.1038/115195a0
Dart, RA. (1948) The adolescent mandible of Australopithecus prometheus. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 6(4), 391-412. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330060410
DART RA. (1956) The relationships of brain size and brain pattern to human status. The South African Journal of Medical Sciences, 21(1-2), 23-45. PMID: 13380551
Dart, RA. (1958) A further adolescent australopithecine ilium from Makapansgat. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 16(4), 473-479. DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330160407
In an era where popular culture is increasingly recognized for its impact on lay understanding of health and medicine, few scholars have looked at television’s powerful role in the creation of patient expectations, especially regarding pregnancy and birth.... Read more »
Danielle Bessett. (2015) As Seen on TV: Women's Views on Television Representations of Pregnancy and Birth. American Sociological Association’s 110th Annual Meeting. info:other/SES-0402165
Disease-causing viruses engage their hosts in ongoing arms races: positive selection for antiviral genes increases host fitness and survival, and viruses in turn select for mutations that counteract the antiviral host factors. Studying such adaptive mutations can provide insights into the distant history of host-virus interactions. A study of antiviral gene sequences in African monkeys suggests that lentiviruses closely related to HIV have infected primates in Africa as far back as 16 million years.... Read more »
Kevin R. McCarthy, Andrea Kirmaier, Patrick Autissier, & Welkin E. Johnson. (2015) Evolutionary and Functional Analysis of Old World Primate TRIM5 Reveals the Ancient Emergence of Primate Lentiviruses and Convergent Evolution Targeting a Conserved Capsid Interface. PLOS Pathogens. info:/10.1371/journal.ppat.1005085
The hippocampus in the brain’s temporal lobe is responsible for more than just long-term memory. Researchers have for the first time demonstrated that it is also involved in quick and successful conflict resolution.... Read more »
C.R. Oehrn, C. Baumann, J. Fell, H. Lee, H. Kessler, U. Habel, S. Hanslmayr, & N. Axmacher. (2015) Human hippocampal dynamics during response conflict. Current Biology. info:/10.1016/j.cub.2015.07.032
A new study casts doubt on the idea that alcohol causes people to seem more attractive - the famous "beer goggles" effect.
Psychologists Olivia Maynard and colleauges, of Bristol, UK, conducted an unusual "real world" experiment. Rather than doing their testing in the laboratory, they went into three Bristol pubs in the evening (5-11 pm) and recruited volunteers on the spot. With a total sample size of 311, it was a very large sample.
Each participant was breathalyzed to estimate thei... Read more »
Maynard, O., Skinner, A., Troy, D., Attwood, A., & Munafò, M. (2015) Association of Alcohol Consumption with Perception of Attractiveness in a Naturalistic Environment. Alcohol and Alcoholism. DOI: 10.1093/alcalc/agv096
Having friends who suffer from depression doesn’t affect the mental health of others, according to research. The team found that having friends can help teenagers recover from depression or even avoid becoming depressed in the first instance. The findings are the result of a study of the way teenagers in a group of US high schools influenced each others’ mood. The academics used a mathematical model to establish if depression spreads from friend to friend.... Read more »
E. M. Hill, F. E. Griffiths, & T. House. (2015) Spreading of healthy mood in adolescent social networks. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. info:/10.1098/rspb.2015.1180
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