What appears to be evidence of the oldest alphabetic writing in human history is etched onto finger-length, clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in Syria by a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers. The writing, which is dated to around 2400 BCE, precedes other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years, upending what archaeologists know...
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Who Is Most Vulnerable to Commercial Sexual Exploitation?
Educational achievement, mental health diagnoses, childhood abuse, number of arrests and number of children all play a complex role in shaping a person’s vulnerability to commercial sexual exploitation, how long they are exploited for and how difficult it is to get out. That is one conclusion of a new study published November 20, 2024 in...
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Won’t You Be Mine? Neighborly Networking May Motivate Local Climate Action
Individual motivation to act against climate change outweighs the impact of hyperlocal collective intentions, though both approaches are worth strengthening, according to a survey of nine European neighborhoods published Nov. 20, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate by Christian A. Klöckner from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and colleagues. Western society contests the individual...
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Experts Make Sense of the Science Shaping Public Policies Worldwide in New Policy Labs Series
In the Making Sense of Science series – launched today by Frontiers’ Policy Labs in partnership with the International Science Council (ISC) – world leading scientists, including scientific experts and knowledge brokers from the ISC Fellowship, give insights into how science should be understood by the public and applied to policies that affect societies worldwide....
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Northerners, Scots and Irish Excel at Detecting Fake Accents to Guard Against Outsiders, Cambridge Study Suggests
People from Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin and the north-east of England are better at detecting someone imitating their accent than people from London and Essex, new research from the University of Cambridge has found. People from Belfast proved most able to detect someone faking their accent, while people from London, Essex and Bristol were least accurate....
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Dorothy Allison Was an Authentic Voice for the Poor, Capturing the Beauty, Humor and Pain of Working-Class Life in America
Dorothy Allison, who died on Nov. 5, 2024, published her first novel, “Bastard Out of Carolina,” in 1992, when she was 42 years old. She mined her own life to craft the semi-autobiographical work, which became a finalist for the National Book Award. Growing up poor in Greenville, South Carolina, Allison endured abuse of all...
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Robo Price-Fixing: Why the Justice Department Is Suing a Software Company to Stop Landlords Colluding on Rents
Of all the reasons it could be hard to pay rent each month, did you have an algorithm-powered illegal cartel on your list? Millions of people across the United States are paying far more rent than they can reasonably afford, with rental housing prices rising far quicker than household income. In 2022, 22.4 million U.S....
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The Opera and The Magic Flute
The Florida Grand Opera’s staging of The Magic Flute is a truly astonishing update on the classic Mozart opera. The FGO and director Jeffery Marc Buchman have gone beyond the usual expectations for this lavish fantasy of an opera, and have rooted it in reality by framing with dream sequences of an actual, contemporary child....
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One Election Victory Does Not Make a New Era in American Politics − Here’s What History Shows
According to The New York Times, “… a newly triumphant Republican president” is “once again in the headlines.” What will it take to break “the present national divide, between the narrow but solid Republican majority and a Democratic party seemingly trapped in second place,” asks the Times. That pattern “may be hardening” into one “that...
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Asking ChatGPT vs Googling: Can AI Chatbots Boost Human Creativity?
Think back to a time when you needed a quick answer, maybe for a recipe or a DIY project. A few years ago, most people’s first instinct was to “Google it.” Today, however, many people are more likely to reach for ChatGPT, OpenAI’s conversational AI, which is changing the way people look for information. Rather...
