Neanderthals died out around 40,000 years ago, possibly due to climate change and competition and interbreeding with modern humans, but no one knows for sure. New research on one Neanderthal population in Belgium right before extinction shows that it had healthy levels of genetic diversity and no signs of stress from interbreeding with modern humans. The findings suggest that extinction played out differently across the vast range that Neanderthals occupied across Europe and Central Asia.

A new study from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign labor relations scholar John Kallas explores how union activists practiced “intersectional organizing” at work by uniting around shared social identities rather than better pay and working conditions. 

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London found that the moral themes in popular music lyrics shifted over the past 60 years, with moral vices appearing more frequently than virtues.  

A study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) now sheds light, for the first time, on the carbon intensity of household consumption across much of the world – and thus on the distributional impact of climate policy, which, after all, makes carbon more expensive. The greatest differences are not between rich and poor, but within income groups: key factors include car ownership, place of residence and energy use. The study provides guidance on how to socially balance the fight against global heating. Published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM), it is supplemented by an interactive online carbon price calculator.

Voluntary participation in national defence has received considerable attention in Finland since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. While participation in voluntary national defence and its associated organisations have been a part of Finnish civil society since independence, they have largely been overlooked in research conducted outside the armed forces, until now.