Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Researchers are trying to teach residents to respect Long Island beach spaces occupied by shore birds – CBS New York

LONG ISLAND -- Two Long Island beaches are part of a national study into how human behavior can help endangered shore birds.

As CBS2's Carolyn Gusoff reported Monday, our beaches are filled with threatened birds that thrive when given room to nest and rest.

Lido Beach may look somewhat empty, but it's actually filled with fragile bird life that is breeding.

Long Island ocean beaches are as much a people playground as they are a wildlife preserve.

"It's an entire ecosystem that we are protecting, but also how to balance that with recreation and to provide these spaces for people to come with their families to enjoy the beaches," said Tara Schneider-Moran, a Town of Hempstead biologist.

The Town of Hempstead and Jones Beach are part of a national study to find the best way to help humans understand our beaches belong to endangered birds like piping plovers, American oystercatchers, terns, and black skimmers, too.

"We do want to push for this idea of sharing the shore. It's not just their nesting area, that it's also our beach season where we are playing volleyball, going swimming," said Shelby Casas of Audubon NY.

The study on the East Coast's Atlantic Flyway, conducted by the Audubon Society and Virginia Tech, will determine how best to teach the public to co-exist, keeping dogs away, and walking around shore birds, not through a flock.

"I like to think of it as sort of a smiley face. If you think of the two birds right in front of you along the edge of the water or out in the sand, if you just do a half circle around them, then you're not walking straight at them," said Ashley Dayer, a professor of fish and wildlife at Virginia Tech.

The researchers are getting the message out with fencing, signage, in-person outreach, and asking the public to keep at least 100 feet from a nesting area.

"That's a little hard to visualize. We have a lot of ways. It's like six kayaks worth of space from the birds. Stay out of the fenced areas. They are clearly marked. They have signage," Casas said.

Getting too close makes birds fly off in fear leaving eggs and young vulnerable.

"We want to protect them so that generations to come can appreciate them and go to the beach and see them nesting for years and years to come," Casas said.

"They are beautiful birds. We love seeing them," said Gail Blumenthal of Oceanside.

"I love the beach, it's nature. The animals belong here," added Stacey Ortiz of Bellmore.

The study's results are due next spring. Researchers are hoping to determine how many more chicks were bred because humans learned how to share the shore.

There are 464 nesting pairs of piping plovers across Long Island.

Carolyn Gusoff has covered some of the most high profile news stories in the New York City area and is best known as a trusted, tenacious, consistent and caring voice of Long Island's concerns.

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Researchers are trying to teach residents to respect Long Island beach spaces occupied by shore birds - CBS New York

Human Behavior

Why the top baby names then get less popular – Futurity: Research News

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The more popular a baby name becomes, the less likely parents are to choose it, research finds.

Parents first chose the name Maverick after a television show called Maverick aired in the 1950s, but its popularity rose meteorically in 1986 with the release of the movie Top Gun. Today, it is even used for baby girls.

The name Emma peaked in popularity in the late 1800s, declined precipitously through the first half of the 1900s, then shot back up to be one of the most popular names of the early 2000s. Linda peaked somewhere in the late 1940s and Daniel in the mid-1980s. But each rise in popularity was followed by an equally steep decline.

Same goes for popular dog breeds: Dalmatians today are a tenth as popular as they were in the 1990s.

Mitchell Newberry, an assistant professor of complex systems, says examining trends in the popularity of baby names and dog breeds can be a proxy for understanding ecological and evolutionary change. The names and dog breed preferences themselves are like genes or organisms competing for scarce resources. In this case, the scarce resources are the minds of parents and dog owners. His results are published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

Newberry looks at frequency-dependent selection, a kind of natural selection in which the tendency to copy a certain variant depends on that variants current frequency or popularity, regardless of its content. If people tend to copy the most common variant, then everyone ends up doing roughly the same thing. But if people become less willing to copy a variant the more popular it becomes, it leads to a greater diversity of variants.

Think of how we use millions of different names to refer to people but we almost always use the same word to refer to baseball, Newberry says. For words, theres pressure to conform, but my work shows that the diversity of names results from pressures against conformity.

These trends are common in biology, but difficult to quantify. What researchers do have is a complete database of the names of babies over the last 87 years.

Newberry used the Social Security Administration baby name database, itself born in 1935, to examine frequency dependence in first names in the United States. He found that when a name is most rare1 in 10,000 birthsit tends to grow, on average, at a rate of 1.4% a year. But when a name is most commonmore than 1 in 100 birthsits popularity declines, on average, at 1.6%.

This is really a case study showing how boom-bust cycles by themselves can disfavor common types and promote diversity, Newberry says. If people are always thirsting after the newest thing, then its going to create a lot of new things. Every time a new thing is created, its promoted, and so more rare things rise to higher frequency and you have more diversity in the population.

Using the same techniques they applied to baby names, Newberry and colleagues examined dog breed preferences using a database of purebred dog registrations from the American Kennel Club. They found boom-bust cycles in the popularity of dog breeds similar to the boom-bust cycles in baby names.

The researchers found a Greyhound boom in the 1940s and a Rottweiler boom in the 1990s. This shows what researchers call a negative frequency dependent selection, or anti-conformity, meaning that as frequency increases, selection becomes more negative. That means that rare dog breeds at 1 in 10,000 tend to increase in popularity faster than dogs already at 1 in 10.

Biologists basically think these frequency-dependent pressures are fundamental in determining so many things, Newberry says. The long list includes genetic diversity, immune escape, host-pathogen dynamics, the fact that theres basically a one-to-one ratio of males and femalesand even what different populations think is sexy.

Why do birds like long tails? Why do bamboos take so long to flower? Why do populations split into different species? All of these relate at a fundamental level to either pressures of conformity or anti-conformity within populations.

Conformity is necessary within species, Newberry says. For example, scientists can alter the order of genes on a flys chromosomes, and it does not affect the fly at all. But that doesnt happen in the wild, because when that fly mates, its genes wont pair with its mates, and their offspring will not survive.

However, we also need anti-conformity, he says. If we all had the same immune system, we would all be susceptible to exactly the same diseases. Or, Newberry says, if the same species of animal all visited the same patch of land for food, they would quickly eat themselves out of existence.

Life is this dance of when do we have to cohere, and when do we have to separate? he says. Natural selection is incredibly hard to measure. Youre asking, for an entire population, who lived, who died, and why? And thats just a crazy thing to try to ask. By contrast, in names, we literally know every single name for the entire country for a hundred years.

Source: University of Michigan

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Why the top baby names then get less popular - Futurity: Research News

Human Behavior

Letter to the Mountaineer editor Fort Carson Mountaineer – fortcarsonmountaineer.com

Editors note: The following is a letter to the editor from a Colorado Springs community member who was assisted after being involved in a car accident.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. To whom it may concern,

On May 21, 2022, the weekend of the snowstorm, I found myself in a car accident involving another driver off of Southgate Road. A Soldier saw the accident and pulled over to check if both parties were OK.

After the Soldier deemed both parties were uninjured, he helped move the vehicles out of traffic and off the snowy road. He helped both parties make sure a claim was filed and tow trucks were called. He stayed with me and the other driver until a tow truck showed up.

Once the tow truck loaded the other drivers vehicle, the helpful Soldier offered a ride to that driver and took him back to his home. After he dropped off that driver he went back to the scene and waited for another tow truck to load my vehicle, followed by offering me and my service dog a ride back to my home.

He also made my service dog feel completely safe and allowed her in his vehicle for the ride home. I failed to the get name of the Soldier who went above and beyond, and he deserves to be commended for his outstanding human behavior. Fort Carson along with the Army should feel proud to have him among the ranks.

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Letter to the Mountaineer editor Fort Carson Mountaineer - fortcarsonmountaineer.com

Human Behavior

Its Pride month, and certain behavior is nothing to be proud of – Chicago Sun-Times

Welcome to LGBTQ+ Pride Month, sports fans. Tolerance is fun, isnt it?

Im speaking, specifically, to fans at the Mexico-Ecuador game at Soldier Field on Sunday night, the ones who chanted a homophobic slur at Ecuadorian goalkeeper Alexander Dominguez as he attempted a kick late in the game.

This wasnt about Dominguez being gay or anything like that. The 6-5, 35-year-old veteran is straight, for all we know. But thats not relevant anyway.

This was about Mexicos fans chanting a nasty, homophobic word in Spanish that they have been warned many times not to use. And its not just that one word, either.

Soccer fans around the world have been told by governing body FIFA to knock off all sexual, racial and ethnic chants aimed at foes. And the use of a three-step warning system with the third tier being cancellation of the game is the penalty for such behavior.

The Mexico-Ecuador game, a friendly, by the way, was paused in the 81st minute while a warning flashed on the scoreboard.

STEP #1, it read. ANY INDIVIDUAL PARTICIPATING IN THE DISCRIMINATORY CHANT WILL BE EJECTED FROM THE STADIUM.

Players from both teams gathered peacefully in the center circle, the crowd tamed, and shortly the game continued.

But we still have a gay thing going on in this world, and demeaning an opponent with a homophobic slur is the time-honored way of attacking not just a foes abilities but his or her status as a human being.

Even as we see rainbow colors throughout Chicago, and even as our city prepares for its annual Pride Parade on June 26, the forces against acceptance remain.

Clearly, these are troubling, confusing times for us all. It seems every minority or oppressed person or group has abruptly demanded equality as fast as possible.Sometimes, even faster than possible.

But this is how things change. This is how turbulence leads to equity, to fairness. And to hold out against such change is to fall behind history and, ultimately, to be humiliated.

That kind of reluctance was at the root of the nasty chant that rocked 61,000 fans at Soldier Field. Of course, we cant rule out the effect of alcohol here, either. Its probably no coincidence the slurs came after the crowd had hours of warm-weather drinking under its belt.

Yet there was no boozing among Rays players who refused to wear the rainbow cap and sleeve decals designed by their team for the clubs 16th Pride Night held Saturday at Tropicana Field.

The Rays played the White Sox, and fans watching probably barely noticed anything unusual about any of the uniforms because players wear camouflage, pink, retro and hybrid outfits almost as often as regular ones.

So why bother to consciously remove a little rainbow sleeve starburst or a barely altered cap?

Rays pitcher Jason Adam pointed to his religious objections, saying, Its just that maybe we dont want to encourage [gay behavior] if we believe in Jesus, whos encouraged us to live a lifestyle that would abstain from that behavior.

So theres that. Maybe Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his crackdown on sexual-orientation teachings in the first years of grade school were a subtle part of this, too.

But its Pride Month in the United States, no matter what, and attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ citizens of our country will keep changing, always for the better, we must hope.

Myself, I am not convinced that mature transgender women that is, females who went through puberty and have trained as males should be allowed to compete at the highest levels with cisgender females.

My mind could change. I dont know. Information is key. As is science. Lia Thomas 6-3, broad-shouldered and a male for 21 years winning a womens NCAA swimming championship made me dubious. But well see.

Remember this: According to a recent Gallup poll, 71% of Americans now support gay marriage. In 1996, only 27% did. Thats pretty fast change.

Theres also the weariness that comes from resisting something that is personal, inevitable, applies only to others and should not affect our private lives at all. I often chuckle at a poem by late British writer Dorothy Sayers, admiring its wisdom:

As I grow older and older

And totter towards the tomb

I find I care less and less

Who goes to bed with whom.

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Its Pride month, and certain behavior is nothing to be proud of - Chicago Sun-Times

Human Behavior

On Fatherlessness and Mass Shootings – Daily Citizen – Daily Citizen

As the unspeakable evil of mass shootings continue to increase, each of us are trying to understand what could be driving these tragedies. There are no shortage of explanations being bandied about with absolute certainty, from ineffectual gun control laws, mental illness, peer bullying, first-person shooter video games, violence in movies and television shows, growing personal anger and alienation. Fatherlessness has even been mentioned as a driver. Others strongly deny the linkage and blame guns.

Senator Mike Lee, R-Utah, considered the role of family breakdown and fatherlessness in a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Lee said, Every time one of these tragedies occurs, for too long we have failed to look back at the root causes of rampage violence. Why is our culture all of sudden producing so many young men who want to murder innocent people? Lee continued, It raises the question, could fatherlessness, the break-down of the family, isolation from civil society or the glorification of violence be contributing factors?

The Senator is asking important questions. But others disagree.

A faculty member at the highly conservative Brigham Young University recently opined in the Mormon-owned Deseret News that as a sociologist of family and fatherhood, I can tell you that the best available evidence suggests that neither is responsible for the increase in these horrific events. He denies father absence and family breakdown are drivers. He says its guns.

But leading mainstream sociologists and the larger body of data disagree with this dismissal. Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia and founder and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, contends, Sen. Mike Lee is right to wonder if fatherlessness and family breakdown are factors in the tidal wave of violence that has engulfed America since 2020.

Professor Wilcox adds, We know that young men who are raised without the benefit of good fathers are more likely to engage in violent behavior. Of course, other factors are also likely in play

It has long been consistently demonstrated that fatherlessness, violence, and criminal behavior go together in dramatic ways. The U.S. Department of Justice explains that the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency reported in 1997 that the most reliable indicator of violent crime in a community is the proportion of fatherless families. This scholarly journal also reported, According to a 1993 Metropolitan Life Survey, Violence in Americas Public Schools, 71 percent of teachers and 90 percent of law enforcement officials state that the lack of parental supervision at home is a major factor that contributes to the violence in schools. And fatherlessness decreases the amount and quality of this supervision dramatically.

More recently, a 2021 meta-analysis in the scientific journal Psychology, Crime & Law examined 48 different academic studies on the relationship between fatherlessness and criminal behavior, finding a remarkably strong correlation. These scholars explain, the results suggest that growing up in a single-parent family and adolescent involvement in crime are related since a large majority of the studies shows a positive relation between single-parent families and the level of crime. They add their findings are in accordance with previous literature reviews on the topic.

These scholars seem to agree with leaders like Senator Mike Lee when they conclude their journal article with this encouragement: it is important to investigate in more detail how this relation between single-parent families and crime works to ensure that criminal behavior by adolescents is minimized.

Deserert News countered such findings with curious statements from a variety of miscellaneous scholars like Shawn Fremstad, a scholar at the Center for Economic Policy Research,

Mass shootings are extreme events, so we dont have a lot of demographic or survey data to look at, but there is no evidence-based reason for believing that mass shootings are caused by single mothers, grandmothers who raised their grandchildren or lesbian couples, all examples of fatherless household arrangements.

Fremstad is correct from a number of angles. But wrong in others.

Yes, the violent and public slaughter of innocent lives with high-powered guns is an extreme event that confounds all reason. And no one is saying fatherlessness alone is driving such tragedies. But to dismiss it altogether is unsound.

There has not been a great deal of research breaking down the psychological profiles and reasoning behind such shootings. But there has been some, as we will examine below. But isolating single reasons for such madness is nearly impossible because such atrocities challenge any sort of reasoning. It is nearly impossible to find reasons for inherently irrational actions. And certainly, a mass shooter does not a fatherless home create. But it certainly does cause all such children to walk with significant emotional, developmental and spiritual limps.

That is the problem with trying to explain the unspeakable evil of mass shooting with a single driver like gun possession, mental illness, violent video games, or the breakdown of the family. Yes, psychologists find that fatherlessness negatively impacts nearly every measure of well-being for children, including criminal and violent behavior. Sociologists find the same thing. Fatherlessness does not generally benefit any measure of child well-being. None.

But guns and fatherlessness have been widely experienced in our society for decades. Neither can be isolated as the primary cause of the dramatic increase in mass shootings we are experiencing in the last twenty years. There must be other troubling factors as well.

The U.S. Department of Justices National Institute of Justice (NIJ) recently reported that [p]ersons who committed public mass shootings in the U.S. over the last half century were commonly troubled by personal trauma before their shooting incidents, nearly always in a state of crisis at the time. Specially, NIJ reported, Suicidality was found to be a strong predictor of perpetration of mass shootings. In fact, among young people, NIJ reports that 92% of mass shooters committed by those in the K-12 age range were found to be suicidal at the time of the shootings and 100% of college-age shooters were suicidal at the time!

Family breakdown and father abandonment certainly fit as a major life driver of such individual pain and life trauma. Who can deny this fact? But we must also be open to considering additional evils at work today driving such horrific social problems if we are going to find real solutions. Human behavior is indeed complex. Pure evil is too and that is what each mass shooting is.

Photo from Shutterstock.

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On Fatherlessness and Mass Shootings - Daily Citizen - Daily Citizen

Human Behavior

DiPiazza named Delaware Behavioral Specialist of the Year – Milford LIVE

Rosa DiPiazza, BHP, a behavioral specialist with Milford School District was recently named Delaware Behavioral Health Specialist of the Year. DiPiazza has been with Milford since completing an internship as part of her masters degree.

Ive always been interested in the intersection of science and behavior, but it took me some time to find the right balance for me, DiPiazza said. I worked in a neuroscience research lab for a while in college, but quickly realized I needed more human interaction. That led me to work with Domestic Violence Services, which solidified my desire to work with children and my belief in the importance of early intervention. Part of that work included partnering with schools to run prevention education groups. I loved working in schools and being able to provide consistent services to children. I initially started my graduate work in clinical psychology, but when I learned about school psychology, I realized it was a great fit for me and switched programs. I love school psychology because it combines data-driven interventions and science with direct human service. Its the best of both worlds.

DiPiazza graduated from Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 2013 with a bachelors degree in neuroscience. She worked as a Childrens Advocate with Domestic Violence Services of Lancaster County before starting graduate school at Millersville University in Millersville, Pennsylvania, where she earned a bachelors degree psychology and an educational specialist certification in school psychology. While DiPiazza was finishing her masters degree, her mother moved to Delaware. She felt it made sense to search for internships and was selected for one in Milford where she has remained.

One of the most challenging things about this job is how long it can take to see progress in student mental health, DiPiazza said. I think theres sometimes a perception that everything gets better immediately if you just get someone started with counseling or other mental health supports. Thats usually not the case. Progress in mental health can be a slow process that sometimes doubles back on itself. Its important to stay hopeful and optimistic. You have to be able to look for the incremental changes and hold expectations that are both high and reasonable. Sometimes it feels like there isnt any progress being made at all, and then all of a sudden everything will come together. That can be a different kind of challenging. Thats usually when students graduate from my caseload, which means I see them less when everything is going well.

One of the best parts of her job is building relationships with students, colleagues and families. DiPiazza explained that she loves feeling like she is part of the school community.

I love watching students grow and learn and apply their new skills in new situations, DiPiazza said. Being involved in problem-solving teams and providing consultative support to colleagues is deeply rewarding. Not only can I see students improving, I am often also able to watch colleagues take those same skills and strategies and apply them in other situations with other students. Anything I can do to share my knowledge and expertise with others and build collective capacity is rewarding. Hoarded knowledge helps one person; shared knowledge helps us all.

As part of the recognition, DiPiazza receives a $2,000 personal award in recognition of being chosen as the district Behavioral Specialist of the Year. She also receives an additional $3,000 as a state winner and the Delaware Department of Education provides her with a $5,000 grant to be used for the educational benefit of her students.

I hope to use this platform to advocate for universal implementation of trauma-informed practices and well-functioning multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) in our schools, DiPiazza said. Things like having calming areas in our classrooms and schools, building consistent structure and routines into our days, and praising effort and growth feel like small changes, but they can go a long way towards making our students feel safe and cared for at school. When these things are part of every students school experience, we are then able to identify students who need additional supports and provide them with what they need without overwhelming our systems.

Laura Manges, Director of Student Services, believes this was an amazing honor for DiPiazza, but is not at all surprised she received it.

From the moment Rosa began working with our students in Milford, she provided a level of compassion, maturity and expertise that was extremely rare to find in such a young practitioner, Manges said. The Milford School community is truly fortunate to have Rosa DiPiazza on our team. She most certainly is a leader in behavioral health. I look for more great things to come from her leadership in the future.

Dr. Kevin Dickerson, Superintendent, echoed the sentiments of Manges.

We are incredibly proud of Ms. DiPiazza for her deserved recognition as Delawares Behavioral Health Professional of the Year, stated Dr. Dickerson. We are extremely grateful to have Ms. DiPiazza working in the Milford School District and, furthermore, for the exceptional work that she does with our students, staff and families. This is a tremendous honor and is reflective of the huge impact she has serving our students and the entire Mispillion Elementary Schools school-community.

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DiPiazza named Delaware Behavioral Specialist of the Year - Milford LIVE

Human Behavior

Rice’s top-ranked I-O psychology program has helped its alumni stand out – Rice News

Earlier this year, Rice Universitys graduate program in industrial organizational psychology was ranked No. 1 in the nation by U.S. News and World Report .

The top ranking comes as no surprise to the faculty, students and alumni affiliated with the program, long known for excellence in the field of I-O psychology, the scientific study of human behavior in organizations and the workplace.

"I am so proud of the world-class scholars in our I/O Psychology program who bring such energy and skill to their work," said Rice Dean of Social Sciences Rachel Kimbro. "This is a well-deserved recognition!"

The I-O program is an undiscovered diamond at Rice, said Eduardo Salas, department chair and I-O professor of psychological sciences. Just look at the accomplishments of the faculty from national scholarly lifetime achievement awards to national teaching awards winners. Our faculty and graduate students conduct impactful research on a range of issues, including diversity and inclusion, resilience in organizations, employee training and testing, team science, safety, the aging workforce and artificial intelligence in the workplace. Our expertise is sought out worldwide.

Rice I-O psychological sciences faculty include three past presidents of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and five fellows of the organization. They have authored books, won numerous teaching, mentoring and research awards, and received millions of dollars in grant funding.

In short, theyre exactly what you would expect in the No. 1-ranked program in this discipline, Salas said.

Perhaps the biggest indicators of the programs success are its alumni, who have flourished in fields ranging from academia to health care to aerospace.

Eden King, the Lynette S. Autrey Professor of Psychology and graduate of Rice with a bachelors degree and Ph.D. in psychological sciences, was attracted to Rices culture before attending as an undergraduate. She returned for graduate school because of the chance to work with Mikki Hebl, the Martha and Henry Malcolm Lovett Chair of Psychology, to address meaningful questions about prejudice and discrimination at work.

I definitely had a competitive edge because of the mentorship I received, King said, recalling professors who stopped at nothing to make sure she was prepared for entering the workforce. The faculty at Rice helped make sure that I had the knowledge, skills and scholarly evidence to propel me forward in my career.

Stephanie Zajac, a leadership practitioner at MD Anderson Cancer Center, picked Rice and the Department of Psychological Sciences because she was seeking a smaller, more personal environment for grad school.

In the grad school rankings, the culture at Rice was mentioned as something that really drew students there, and I could tell when I visited that it was very supportive and collegial. Both the students and the professors were warm and inviting, she said. Also, Rice overall is an amazing university with a very good reputation in the field.

Zajac said the programs rigor, in combination with professors who were truly invested in her success, helped her determine her career direction and find success in this field.

Whatever your goals are, they are invested in helping you get there, she said. I still have a great relationship with our I-O professors and have worked with many of them throughout my professional career.

Like King and Zajac, Kelly Goff, currently senior director of talent strategy for Blue Origin, came to Rice because of the I-O programs quality, support of graduate students and the reputation of the university overall as well as its central location in Houston. She is responsible for workforce planning, compensation, talent management, talent analytics and employer branding for her company, which is working to enable a future where millions of people are living and working in space for the benefit of Earth.

It was important to me to select a program that was supportive of not only the academic research, but the practical application in the real world, she said. I knew before grad school that I wanted to use my education by applying research-backed solutions within companies. Rice provided that balanced approach strong academics coupled with industry connections.

Goff said Rices affiliation with a variety of organizations provided a pathway to practical work experiences in the Texas Medical Center and an internship at NASA.

Rices I-O program provided a very strong foundation in how to do research identify a problem, investigate, understand relevant research in the field, experimentation, statistical analysis and writing, she said. My success in my career is largely due to these skills applied to a variety of problems. Knowing how to do research has given me the ability to tackle any problem, especially new ones, and work through them successfully.

More information on Rices Department of Psychological Sciences is available online at https://psychology.rice.edu.

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Rice's top-ranked I-O psychology program has helped its alumni stand out - Rice News

Human Behavior

Ancient DNA helps reveal social changes in Africa 50000 years ago that shaped the human story – Roanoke Times

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

(THE CONVERSATION) Every person alive on the planet today is descended from people who lived as hunter-gatherers in Africa.

The continent is the cradle of human origins and ingenuity, and with each new fossil and archaeological discovery, we learn more about our shared African past. Such research tends to focus on when our species, Homo sapiens, spread out to other landmasses 80,000-60,000 years ago. But what happened in Africa after that, and why dont we know more about the people who remained?

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Our 2022 study, conducted by an interdisciplinary team of 44 researchers based in 12 countries, helps answer these questions. By sequencing and analyzing ancient DNA (aDNA) from people who lived as long ago as 18,000 years, we roughly doubled the age of sequenced aDNA from sub-Saharan Africa. And this genetic information helps anthropologistslikeus understand more about how modern humans were moving and mingling in Africa long ago.

Tracing our human past in Africa

Beginning about 300,000 years ago, people in Africa who looked like us the earliest anatomically modern humans also started behaving in ways that seem very human. They made new kinds of stone tools and began transporting raw materials up to 250 miles (400 kilometers), likely through trade networks. By 140,000-120,000 years ago, people made clothing from animal skins and began to decorate themselves with pierced marine shell beads.

While early innovations appeared in a patchwork fashion, a more widespread shift happened around 50,000 years ago around the same time that people started moving into places as distant as Australia. New types of stone and bone tools became common, and people began fashioning and exchanging ostrich eggshell beads. And while most rock art in Africa is undated and badly weathered, an increase in ochre pigment at archaeological sites hints at an explosion of art.

What caused this shift, known as the Later Stone Age transition, has been a longstanding archaeological mystery. Why would certain tools and behaviors, which up until that point had appeared in a piecemeal way across Africa, suddenly become widespread? Did it have something to do with changes in the number of people, or how they interacted?

The challenge of accessing the deep past

Archaeologists reconstruct human behavior in the past mainly through things people left behind remains of their meals, tools, ornaments and sometimes even their bodies. These records may accumulate over thousands of years, creating views of daily livelihoods that are really averages over long periods of time. However, its hard to study ancient demography, or how populations changed, from the archaeological record alone.

This is where DNA can help. When combined with evidence from archaeology, linguistics and oral and written history, scientists can piece together how people moved and interacted based on which groups share genetic similarities.

But DNA from living people cant tell the whole story. African populations have been transformed over the past 5,000 years by the spread of herding and farming, the development of cities, ancient pandemics and the ravages of colonialism and slavery. These processes caused some lineages to vanish and brought others together, forming new populations.

Using present-day DNA to reconstruct ancient genetic landscapes is like reading a letter that was left out in the rain: some words are there but blurred, and some are gone completely. Researchers need ancient DNA from archaeological human remains to explore human diversity in different places and times and to understand what factors shaped it.

Unfortunately, aDNA from Africa is particularly hard to recover because the continent straddles the equator and heat and humidity degrade DNA. While the oldest aDNA from Eurasia is roughly 400,000 years old, all sequences from sub-Saharan Africa to date have been younger than around 9,000 years.

Breaking the tropical ceiling

Because each person carries genetic legacies inherited from generations of their ancestors, our team was able to use DNA from individuals who lived between 18,000-400 years ago to explore how people interacted as far back as the last 80,000-50,000 years. This allowed us, for the first time, to test whether demographic change played a role in the Later Stone Age transition.

Our team sequenced aDNA from six individuals buried in what are now Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia. We compared these sequences to previously studied aDNA from 28 individuals buried at sites stretching from Cameroon to Ethiopia and down to South Africa. We also generated new and improved DNA data for 15 of these people, trying to extract as much information as possible from the small handful of ancient African individuals whose DNA is preserved well enough to study.

This created the largest genetic dataset so far for studying the population history of ancient African foragers people who hunted, gathered or fished. We used it to explore population structures that existed prior to the sweeping changes of the past few thousand years.

DNA weighs in on a longstanding debate

We found that people did in fact change how they moved and interacted around the Later Stone Age transition.

Despite being separated by thousands of miles and years, all the ancient individuals in this study were descended from the same three populations related to ancient and present-day eastern, southern and central Africans. The presence of eastern African ancestry as far south as Zambia, and southern African ancestry as far north as Kenya, indicates that people were moving long distances and having children with people located far away from where they were born. The only way this population structure could have emerged is if people were moving long distances over many millennia.

Additionally, our research showed that almost all ancient eastern Africans shared an unexpectedly high number of genetic variations with hunter-gatherers who today live in central African rainforests, making ancient eastern Africa truly a genetic melting pot. We could tell that this mixing and moving happened after about 50,000 years ago, when there was a major split in central African forager populations.

We also noted that the individuals in our study were genetically most like only their closest geographic neighbors. This tells us that after around 20,000 years ago, the foragers in some African regions were almost exclusively finding their partners locally. This practice must have been extremely strong and persisted for a very long time, as our results show that some groups remained genetically independent of their neighbors over several thousand years. It was especially clear in Malawi and Zambia, where the only close relationships we detected were between people buried around the same time at the same sites.

We dont know why people began living locally again. Changing environments as the last Ice Age peaked and waned between about 26,000-11,500 years ago may have made it more economical to forage closer to home, or perhaps elaborate exchange networks reduced the need for people to travel with objects.

Alternatively, new group identities may have emerged, restructuring marriage rules. If so, we would expect to see artifacts and other traditions like rock art diversify, with specific types clumped into different regions. Indeed, this is exactly what archaeologists find a trend known as regionalization. Now we know that this phenomenon not only affected cultural traditions, but also the flow of genes.

As always, aDNA research raises as many questions as answers. Finding central African ancestry throughout eastern and southern Africa prompts anthropologists to reconsider how interconnected these regions were in the distant past. This is important because central Africa has remained archaeologically understudied, in part because of political, economic and logistical challenges that make research there difficult.

Additionally, while genetic evidence supports a major demographic transition in Africa after 50,000 years ago, we still dont know the key drivers. Determining what triggered the Later Stone Age transition will require closer examination of regional environmental, archaeological and genetic records to understand how this process unfolded across sub-Saharan Africa.

Finally, this study is a stark reminder that researchers still have much to learn from ancient individuals and artifacts held in African museums, and highlights the critical role of the curators who steward these collections. While some human remains in this study were recovered within the past decade, others have been in museums for a half-century.

Even though technological advances are pushing back the time limits for aDNA, it is important to remember that scientists have only just begun to understand human diversity in Africa, past and present.

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Ancient DNA helps reveal social changes in Africa 50000 years ago that shaped the human story - Roanoke Times

Human Behavior

For Electric Cars To Be Viable, Charging Station Locations Need To Be Optimized – Science 2.0

One thing electric car owners who have lost the mystique tell you is that you live your life around them. Some report going to a store like Costco to charge their cars, they need new service panels at their house, and one owner famously blew up his Tesla with dynamite rather than pay $22,000 to replace the batteries when they wore out. An article in the Wall Street Journal was by someone excited to rent an electric car for a trip, only to find they spent more time charging it than sleeping.

But, like ethanol, as long as government mandates and subsidizes it, it is here to stay and won't improve a lot, so it would be wise to think about optimizing charging stations. Otherwise we will continue to have cultural theater like owners looking at their watches and griping at someone already plugged in.

The big problem in mass uptake is not just that it won't improve emissions, it is that utilities are often so regulated they cannot improve the grid. An electric car service at a house is equal in load to another home on the grid so they have to be placed carefully for mass consumer use. They are of no benefit if they are not placed based on travel patterns and user demand but right now they are not, they are only based on how little they will harm the grid.

When charging stations are placed based on what will work best for the existing power system rather than the transportation system, travel flow is not considered at all. Since electric cars are still in the novelty'gimmick/environmental halo stage, users will go out of their way to charge a car but gas stations are placed where users go, and for electric cars to become common they need to be just as convenient.

A new simulation hopes to account for power grids, transportation, and user demand. The limitation is what occurs in all models, from economics to political science - if it is just United Nations-style 'splitting the difference' it gives prestige to bad decisions and makes no one happy. The model uses existing power flow and the routes drivers they take when traveling, hoping to minimize travel time for users.

Does it work? The problem with using nonlinear terms and lots of variables is there is no right answer, you can only converge on an answer - and that is predicated on solving the right problem. If I want to know if a bridge will collapse, I am not going to simulate the whole bridge in some super-fine tetrahedral mesh, I will find areas of concern and model those in detail. But with human behavior you have to pick your spots and that is tricky. With electric cars, duration of charging, time of day and even location are in flux because driving patterns are different.

Then there is the energy generation problem itself. Electric car buyers are more literate than organic food shoppers so eventually they will realize that despite $3 trillion in subsidies, solar and wind have not reduced the share of energy produced by fossil fuels. And at least in the US natural gas has joined nuclear as targets of the anti-science left so we have as much chance of building new plants in 13 populous states as we do large astronomy telescopes - not much.

Yet more charging stations with inconsistent usage patterns are going to require greater need for 'reactive' energy generation, which is only possible using 'always on' plants like natural gas. Scientists can solve the math issue pretty well but fixing culture wars is a challenge no one can face.

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For Electric Cars To Be Viable, Charging Station Locations Need To Be Optimized - Science 2.0

Human Behavior

New research indicates that romantic successes and failures can have profound impacts on how men think – PsyPost

A mans popularity in the dating market can influence his sexual attitudes and even his views about socio-political issues, according to new research published in the scientific journal Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology. The study offers new experimental evidence that being unpopular with the opposite sex can shift heterosexual mens views about the minimum wage and healthcare.

It may seem farfetched to say that an individuals dating life can influence the individuals socio-political attitudes. Yet, it is becoming more evident that romantic successes and failures in our everyday dating life can have profound impacts on the ways we think and act, said study author Francesca R. Luberti, a postdoctoral research fellow at Nipissing University in North Bay.

One needs to look no further than the incel phenomenon to have a concrete example of how dating can influence politics. Involuntary celibate (incel) men (an internet subculture thats become more popular in recent years) hold misogynistic attitudes and oppose gender equality because they believe they are unfairly rejected by women. I was interested in these phenomena, and I wanted to experimentally test whether dating popularity with opposite-sex potential partners could really affect heterosexual peoples socio-political attitudes.

In the study, which included 237 single heterosexual young adults, the participants first rated their self-perceived level of desirability as a romantic partner. The participants were then asked to record a short video of themselves in which they explained why they would make a good dating partner.

The participants were told that this video would be viewed by five opposite-sex peers, who would provide feedback in the form of brief video responses. While waiting for the video feedback, the participants completed demographic questionnaires and watched an ostensible loading page where links to the feedback videos slowly appeared one by one.

In reality, however, the video feedback had been prerecorded by actors and actresses. The participants randomly received one of six combinations of feedback, ranging from all positive to all negative.

After viewing the feedback videos, the participants then completed questionnaires related to traditional gender roles, casual sex, the minimum wage and healthcare, and implicit sexual and political attitudes.

We found that unpopular men (those who received a higher number of rejections from their peers) reported less support for casual sex than popular men (those who received a higher number of positive responses). Dating popularity did not affect any of womens socio-political attitudes, Luberti told PsyPost.

We also found that unpopular men reported lower positive affect (positive emotions such as happiness, enthusiasm, and pride) than popular men, and in turn men with lower positive affect reported less support for casual sex, as well as less support for increasing the minimum wage and access to healthcare, than men with higher positive affect.

Thus, the main take away from this study is that womens socio-political attitudes do not seem to be affected by dating popularity, whereas mens dating popularity causes changes in mens positive emotions and these changes in turn can shift some, although not all, of mens socio-political attitudes, Luberti said.

The new findings are in line with previous research, which has found that dating popularity is associated with mens support (or lack of support) for casual sex.

While earlier studies had already shown that dating popularity affects mens attitudes toward casual sex, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first experiment showing that experimentally manipulated dating feedback can also indirectly affect attitudes toward the minimum wage and access to healthcare through changes in mens positive emotions, Luberti explained.

Since these findings were not predicteda priori, further research is necessary to understand why we found significant relationships between dating popularity, positive emotions, and these pro-social attitudes in heterosexual men.

Further research should also try to replicate these findings in other samples, since we only collected data from young heterosexual Australian participants. It would be important to replicate these findings in other countries or include non-heterosexual participants, for example, to further prove the robustness of these patterns, Luberti said.

Moreover, with this study, we could only prove that unpopular men reported significantly different attitudes than popular men, but we could not show whether it is receiving more rejections, receiving fewer positive responses, or both that causes shifts in attitudes. These mechanisms should also be further investigated in future research.

The new findings are also in line with research that has indicated the incel subculture is driven in part by mating markets with higher competition among men.

Overall, this study provides evidence that dating can impact some of heterosexual mens politics, Luberti said. Phenomena like the incel subculture have caused real-world violence, and in recent years increasing political polarization has resulted in more political conflicts. Scientific research that focuses on mating and reproductive strategies can provide valuable insights into the causes of these current social issues.

The study, Changes in Positive Affect Due to Popularity in an Experimental Dating Context Influence Some of Mens, but Not Womens, Socio-Political Attitudes, was authored by Francesca R. Luberti, Khandis R. Blake, and Robert C. Brooks.

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New research indicates that romantic successes and failures can have profound impacts on how men think - PsyPost