When lawmakers name bills after victims of tragedy – such as Megan’s Law or the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 – public support surges, but this emotional boost may come at the expense of sound policymaking, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

At several archaeological sites in southern Africa, hundreds of highly unusual fragments of ostrich eggs have been found. Dating back more than 60,000 years, the shells were engraved by groups of Homo sapiens who lived in that region. A new investigation, led by researchers from the University of Bologna, has now revealed for the first time that these engravings on ostrich eggshells were not random or improvised, but followed recurring and surprisingly organised geometric rules. The study — published in the journal PLOS One — shows the presence of a genuine cognitive organisation of forms, based on parallelism, orthogonality and the repetition of lines and regular patterns.