Sharing is caring. But how much sharing seems fair? In a classical economics test of fairness called the Ultimatum Game, two individuals must agree on how to divide a pot of money. If I propose a split and you accept, … Continue reading
Journal Club
Highlighting recent, timely papers selected by Academy member labs
Category Archives: Journal Club
Social leverage makes great apes share more
Categories: Animal Behavior | Evolution | Journal Club | Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Tagged bonobo, chimpanzee, prosocial, Ultimatum Game
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Could expanding social webs help humans cooperate altruistically on a global scale?
Celebrities and social media influencers are reaching global audiences on unprecedented scales. Such audiences are already forming cooperative groups that could one day tackle complex problems such as climate change, argues a recent perspective published in One Earth. Drawing on … Continue reading
Categories: Journal Club | Sustainability Science
Tagged altruism, biodiversity loss, climate change, empathy, hunter gatherer, protest, social science, sustainability
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Is scientific progress waning? Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
There are so many papers coming out in the largest fields of science that new ideas can’t get a foothold, according to a recent study in PNAS. Researchers analyzed citation trends for 90 million papers and found that in very … Continue reading
Categories: Journal Club | Social Sciences
Tagged durable dominance, electrical engineering, molecular biology, Web of Science
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To find zoonotic viruses, researchers seek genomic signatures of virus adaptations to hosts
In light of the ongoing pandemic, researchers have stepped up efforts to identify new zoonotic threats—viruses that could make the leap from animals to humans and cause future epidemics. Studies aiming to identify such viruses often focus on a novel … Continue reading
Categories: Animal Behavior | Computer sciences | Genetics | Infectious disease | Journal Club | Medical Sciences | Microbiology
Tagged coronavirus, genome, machine learning, MERS, SARS, SARS-Cov-2, zoonosis
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Using helpers, desert birds hedge their bets to weather variable conditions
Unpredictable environments can help explain the evolution of cooperative behavior, according to a decade-long study of birds in the Kalahari Desert. The research showed that white-browed sparrow-weavers (Plocepasser mahali) work to raise the offspring of other birds as a strategy … Continue reading
Categories: Animal Behavior | Ecology | Evolution | Genetics | Journal Club
Tagged altruism, cooperative breeding, drought, Kalahari Desert, kin selection, weaver bird
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Frustrations can combust into a riot regardless of age, politics, or gender
The most common caricature of riots suggests criminal young men are the culprits. But a recent study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests that is not necessarily the case. The study used a video game to incite virtual … Continue reading
An algorithm suggests a sidewalk-space redesign to make cities safer for pedestrians
A recent study in Communications Physics is among the first to systematically analyze whole city networks of spider-webbing roads and sidewalks. Examining 10 global cities, including Boston, Paris, and New York, researchers created an algorithm that could help planners choose … Continue reading
Categories: Computer sciences | Journal Club
Tagged city planning, COVID-19, cycling, pedestrian, sidewalk, social distance, urban planning
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Digital reconstruction gets to the root of 400-million-year-old plant
Researchers have managed to reconstruct the detailed 3-D structure of a fossilized plant more than 400 million years old. The ancient leafy organism, a relative of today’s clubmosses, grew in the Early Devonian era—a crucial time for the development of … Continue reading
Categories: Evolution | Journal Club | Plant Biology
Tagged Asteroxylon mackiei, digital reconstruction, evolution, paleontology, plant roots
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Robot swarms communicate best when messages spread neighbor to neighbor
In the not-so-distant future, swarms of robots could help contain environmental disasters such as wildfires, by locating and dousing the most dangerous patches, even as flames move and spread. But how would these individual robots coordinate effectively to pull off … Continue reading
Categories: Animal Behavior | Computer sciences | Journal Club
Tagged ants, fish, kilobot, majority rule, network connection, node, robot, robotics, schooling, social network, wildfire
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Forests fight drought, even from far away
Forests are said to be the lungs of the Earth—they also provide a moist breath that travels tens to thousands of miles. Dense stands of trees release foggy clouds of condensation. The water molecules from those clouds ride wind currents … Continue reading
Categories: Environmental Sciences | Journal Club
Tagged aforestation, climate change, conservation, drought, IPCC, precipitationshed, rainforest, reforestation
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