Culture

In order to provide farmers and anyone else involved in managing agricultural ecosystems with a tool enabling them to assess the impact of their farming practices on the health of their crops and soils, the Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development NEIKER-Tecnalia has created its new TSEAs or ‘Agricultural Ecosystem Health Cards’.

U.S. Congress members' social circles are more important in how they vote than their liberal or conservative beliefs or constituents' opinions, according to a new model of voting behavior created by Dartmouth College researchers.

The study appears in the journal Research & Politics. A PDF is available on request.

The room is loud with chatter. Glasses clink. Soft music, perhaps light jazz or strings, fills the air. Amidst all of these background sounds, it can be difficult to understand what an adjacent person is saying. A depressed individual, brought to this cocktail party by a well-meaning friend, can slide further into himself, his inability to hear and communicate compounding his sense of isolation.

Why do good people do bad things? It's a question that has been pondered for centuries, and new research published by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology may offer some insights about when people succumb to versus resist ethical temptations.

If you grew up in Northern Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s, sectarianism pervaded every aspect of your everyday life. In fact, such is the pervasiveness of sectarianism that it’s almost been normalised. These days, it’s sometimes not even recognised or regarded as a problem.

School disciplinary actions handed down to students at Utah public schools disproportionately impact American Indian children over all other ethnicities enrolled in the state's public education system, new research from the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law Public Policy Clinic reveals.

If it feels like you forget new information almost as quickly as you hear it, even if you write it down, that’s because we tend to lose almost 40% of new information within the first 24 hours of first reading or hearing it. If we take notes effectively, however, we can retain and retrieve almost 100% of the information we receive.

The stronger our memory is of a certain food, the more likely we are to choose it - even if it is the more unattractive option. Psychologists at the University of Basel conducted a study on how memory influences our choices by offering various foods and using scans to track brain activity. The researchers were able to show that the influence of memory is mediated by increasing communication between the relevant brain areas. The study has been published in the scientific journal Neuron.

Dogs' special relationship to humans may go back 27,000 to 40,000 years, according to genomic analysis of an ancient Taimyr wolf bone reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 21. Earlier genome-based estimates have suggested that the ancestors of modern-day dogs diverged from wolves no more than 16,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age.

The genome from this ancient specimen, which has been radiocarbon dated to 35,000 years ago, reveals that the Taimyr wolf represents the most recent common ancestor of modern wolves and dogs.

Here's the skinny: Not all women will buy products because the models in the advertisements are thin, according to a new study of a diverse group of 239 women by a Baylor University marketing professor.

In fact, marketers and advertisers who default to the "thin ideal" -- the belief that thinner is better -- could be alienating up to 70 percent of their audience, said James Roberts, Ph.D., The Ben H. Williams Professor of Marketing in Baylor's Hankamer School of Business.

Many undocumented workers from Latin America risk migrating to the United States to take jobs in which they will be exploited because they are fleeing from desperate situations and see opportunities to help their families.

That scenario, says Gerardo F. Sandoval of the University of Oregon, emerged from a long-running case study in which under-the-radar networks driven by economic and political pressures were documented. These shadow networks tie workers to low-paying, labor-intensive jobs in new communities and to the towns they left.

A detailed analysis of the remains of a high-status Danish Bronze Age female, known as the Egtved Girl, reveals information about her movements, what she ate, and where her clothes came from. It seems that the Egtved Girl originated from a place outside present-day Denmark and travelled back and forth over large distances during last two years of her life. The findings, published in Scientific Reports this week, offer insights into the movements of high-status European Bronze Age individuals.

War and disease have marched arm in arm for centuries. Wars magnify the spread and severity of disease by disrupting populations. As large groups of people move across borders, they introduce and encounter disease in new places. Often, they move into crowded, resource-poor environments that allow diseases to thrive.

Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzng over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings in The Lancet also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells.

The countries involved were Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, UK, and USA.

Researchers from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have found that drinking chamomile tea was associated with a decreased risk of death from all causes in Mexican-American American women over 65. The findings were recently published online in The Gerontologist.

Chamomile is one of the oldest, most-widely used and well-documented medicinal plants in the world and has been recommended for a variety of healing applications. It is currently widely used as an herbal remedy in Mexico and among Mexican-Americans.