News by Subject Social & Behavior

Thousands of years ago, the Canaanite people lived in a part of the world we now recognize as Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, establishing a culture that became influential in the Middle East and beyond. The Canaanites created the first alphabet, established colonies throughout the Mediterranean, and were mentioned many times in the Bible. But who were they and what ultimately happened to them? Were they annihilated like the Bible says?

Over the past 10,000 years human cultures have expanded from small groups of hunter-gatherers to colossal and complexly organized societies. The secrets to how and why this major cultural transition occurred have largely remained elusive. In an article published on July 24 by Russell Gray and Joseph Watts in PNAS they outline how advances in computational methods and large cross-cultural datasets are beginning to reveal the broad patterns and processes underlying our cultural histories.

Language patterns could be predicted by simple laws of physics, a new study has found. Dr James Burridge from the University of Portsmouth has published a theory using ideas from physics to predict where and how dialects occur.

A team of researchers, including a faculty member and seven students from the University of Washington, has found and dated artifacts in northern Australia that indicate humans arrived there about 65,000 years ago -- more than 10,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Theater has been loved by many people since classical times. Along with its popularity, stage theater construction evolved greatly between the ancient Greek and Roman periods. In this research, a Japanese architectural researcher has clarified the development process for some of the stage equipment that was used in the theaters of Messene, an ancient Greek city.

Over a century since scientists first observed that cells and their nucleus grow at a constant ratio, we are now closer to finding out how. This study was carried out by Assistant Professor Kazunori Kume of Hiroshima University and supervised by Nobel Laureate Sir Paul Nurse. It discovered that hoarding of genetic materials (mRNA) and proteins by the nucleus causes it to bulk up and is enabled by the amount of nuclear membrane supplied.