Scientists from the CNRS, ENS-PSL, Inserm, and Sciences Po revealed an increase in facial displays of trustworthiness in European painting between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries. The findings, published in Nature Communications on 22 September 2020, were obtained by applying face-processing software to two groups of portraits, suggesting an increase in trustworthiness in society that closely...
An international, multi-billion-dollar race is underway to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, and progress is moving at record speed, but with nationalistic, competitive undertones. If and when an effective vaccine is invented, its production will require an unprecedented effort to vaccinate people across the globe. However, for the country that invents a safe and effective vaccine,...
Text messages and emails from political campaigns are pouring into Americans’ phones and inboxes right now. It’s happening to political junkies, to people who gave their phone numbers to campaigns, and even to people who try to keep their contact information off mass mailing lists. I study political campaigns, including how they use social media...
If you are one of the millions of people in the Midwest and Eastern U.S. who turned your gaze toward the sky recently, you may have noticed the Sun shining through an odd, milky haze. This widespread opaque veil was caused not by clouds, but rather by smoke from wildfires in the Western U.S. The...
Imagine being infected with a deadly virus that makes you impervious to pain. By the time you realize you are infected, it’s already too late. You have spread it far and wide. Recent findings in my lab suggest that this scenario may be one reason that people infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19, may...
Summer and fall are wildfire season across the western U.S. In recent years, wildfires have destroyed thousands of homes, forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate and exposed tens of millions to harmful smoke. Wildfires are a natural disturbance for these regions, but when combined with climate change and housing growth in the wildland-urban...
Imagine the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020. Given the unprecedented number of mail-in votes this election, Americans may wake up and still not know who won the presidential contest between Republican President Donald J. Trump and Democratic challenger Joseph Biden. The contest could be so close that a result can’t be known until mail-in...
Recently, Netflix announced a plan to invest $100 million, or 2 percent of its cash holdings, in financial institutions that are Black-owned and support Black communities. This headline event is only the latest development for Black-owned banks: In early June, ahead of the Netflix announcement, investors pushed up stock prices, appearing to vote with their pocketbooks by supporting institutions that have the potential to decrease racial wealth gaps. This...
Prices paid to hospitals nationally during 2018 by privately insured patients averaged 247% of what Medicare would have paid, with wide variation in prices among states, according to a new RAND Corporation study. Some states (Arkansas, Michigan and Rhode Island) had relative prices under 200% of Medicare, while other states (Florida, Tennessee, Alaska, West Virginia...
Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI) scientists have conducted new research highlighting the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on food security in Kenya and Uganda with more than two-thirds of those surveyed having experienced economic hardship due to the pandemic. Dr. Monica Kansiime led a team of researchers who discovered, from a random sample of...
