News by Subject Social & Behavior

Developed countries imposing their own Security Sector Reform (SSR) processes onto nations recovering from war often rely on entrenched colonial attitudes with no guarantee of success. Research led by the University of Kent looked at the Democratic Republic Congo and Nepal contrasting their outcomes and examining the reasons for success or failure of SSR policies based on Europe. They question whether the systems work in their countries of origin where statistics show ongoing institutional racism.

Eddie Lee, doctoral student in physics at Cornell University, applied a statistical physics model to a 'Super Court' of 36 Supreme Court justices and 24 nine-member courts from 1946 to 2016 and found that consensus dominates the court, and strong correlations in voting far outlast any one justice or court.

The story of mankind's presence on the planet can be told by studying the sediment and soil accumulation of these chemical compounds in human feces. Scientists at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and the Institute for the Dynamics of Environmental Processes (CNR) have proven the presence of the individuals who colonized the oceanic islands, and the resulting environmental transformation. The study has been published in Scientific Reports

Archaeologists now have new tools for studying the development of medieval villages and the transformation of the historical landscapes surrounding them. In a study recently published in EPJ Plus, scientists have attempted to reconstruct the history of Zornoztegi, an abandoned medieval village located in the Basque Country, Spain.

After unearthing and analyzing handwritten documentation from scientist Samuel Morton, doctoral candidate Paul Wolff Mitchell of the University of Pennsylvania drew a new conclusion about the infamous 19th-century collection: though Morton accurately measured the brain size of hundreds of human skulls, racist bias still plagued his science.