Social sciences

A piece of pottery found off the coast of Indonesia finally reveals the origins of a sunken ship transporting ceramics and luxury goods.

A multidisciplinary research team is harnessing modern technology to provide new types of evidence on war crimes and human rights violations.

New guidelines show the way to making Europe’s cities more resilient to natural and man-made disasters.

New research shows that the more Europe’s youth visit other Member States, the more civically engaged they will become at home.

Stephen Hawking, the most famous scientist in the world, had a lot to say during his life about topics other than the Big Bang and black holes. Here’s a roundup of the British physicist’s views on everything from aliens to the greatest mystery of all time.

With their growing use in recent years, genetic tests have received a lot of attention. A new study explored how they are evaluated.

New research shows that analysis of forest semantics and its diversity across languages could have a bearing on forest policies and agendas.

Findings overturn the belief that modern humans were Earth’s first artists. Our extinct, distant cousins the Neanderthals seem to hold that distinction now.

A new mathematical framework taking into account ‘crosstalk’ and incorporating the impact of players’ interactions in simulations of repeated social dilemmas could help better analyse cooperation dynamics within a population.

A new study has shown that if we human beings discovered that we’re not alone in the universe, we would probably take this earth-shattering news actually rather well.

Cooperation is one of the pillar of successful communal living, with the convention that those who break the social norms are punished. Researchers have traced evolutionary evidence for this urge for justice in six-year-old children and chimpanzees, with both showing an interest in being present when justice is meted out.

A prehistoric human upper jawbone fragment, including a row of teeth, has been found in a cave in Israel. Dating from about 180 000 years ago, the fossil is almost twice as old as any previous remains of Homo sapiens discovered outside Africa.

Scientists have been searching for over two decades to explain how the Arctic is contaminated with toxic mercury pollution. A new study sheds light on the likely process, while warning of its hazards to humans and the environment.

800 million tweets seem to point in one clear direction, the time of day and time of year when the people tweeted impacts on how positive the content is.

Apps allowing citizens to report crimes or incidents are now commonplace, but they generally fail to adapt local contexts, cultures and sensibilities. SecureU, a new app that addresses this shortcoming, is currently being tested in five European cities.

Walkie-talkies were invented 70 years ago. One could be forgiven for ever thinking that the advent, rise and now omnipresence of mobile phones would sound their death knell. But the truth is, in 2018, walkie-talkies are still being used. Now, a Finnish company proposes to enhance them with the mobile broadband technology we find on our smartphones.

Analysis of the skeletons of victims of the 1545-1550 cocoliztli epidemic in Mexico reveals the presence of salmonella enterica Paratyphi C, a pathogen that causes enteric fever.

From binge watching TV dramas to parents telling their small children bedtime stories, the power of story telling has enthralled us since earliest times. But why? In evolutionary terms wouldn’t the time be better spent on securing food?

A new study suggests human parasites were responsible for the spread of the plague and that the rat may have got a bad rap!

Frailty in the elderly has multiple adverse health outcomes, including disability, morbidity, falls, hospitalisation, institutionalisation, and even death. One project is adding tools to help healthcare professionals treat an ageing population.

Animal and human investigations indicate that the impact of trauma experienced by mothers affects early offspring development, but new research is also discovering that it is also actually encoded into the DNA of subsequent generations.

An end to spikey tree needles sticking into your socks, and if that wasn’t enough to celebrate, new research shows babies conceived over Christmas have some advantages. All too much, then how about the smallest Christmas card ever?

Women living around 7 000 years ago did a lot of heavy lifting in their early agrarian societies. Now skeletal analysis reveals they were even stronger than the top female athletes of today.

Food sharing as a means to both reduce waste and boost urban sustainability is clearly a good idea. But what works where and how can it be made more effective? Just some questions one project is answering.

Wealth distribution can tell us much about a society but when it comes to prehistoric civilizations, a lack of written record makes that hard to trace. New research draws on house size to trace wealth disparity, with interesting results.