A study published November 8 in Science focuses on the ancient DNA of individuals from Rome and adjacent regions in Italy, spanning the last 12,000 years. Those genetic data reveal at least two major migrations into Rome, as well as several smaller but significant population shifts over just the last few thousand years. Notably, DNA analysis revealed...
In the autumn of 2017, hurricanes Irma and Maria destroyed Puerto Rico causing thousands of deaths, illnesses and suffering, which brought about a situation of serious economic, political and public health crisis, and widespread death and destruction. However, neither the US nor the Puerto Rican government reacted adequately to such a grave situation. A scientific...
West Virginia University geographers are linking the political and human rights issues at borders today to the legacies of foreign and domestic policy across the globe since World War I. Karen Culcasi and Cynthia Gorman, of the Department of Geology and Geography in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, have studied more than 100 years of international laws that have...
When the Berlin Wall was completed in August 1961, East German residents immediately tried to figure out ways to circumvent the barrier and escape into West Berlin. By the following summer, NBC and CBS were at work on two separate, secret documentaries on tunnels being dug under the Berlin Wall. The tunnel CBS chose was...
What is the deadliest weapon of the 20th century? Perhaps you think first of the atomic bomb, estimated to have killed as many as 200,000 people when the United States dropped two on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. But another weapon is responsible for far more deaths – numbering up into...
In 1972, the comedian George Carlin performed a comedy routine in which he listed the seven words you couldn’t say on television. He opined that profanity related to sexual activities, body parts and bodily functions wasn’t inherently good or bad. All words, he would say, are “innocent.” But reciting those seven words in public got...
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U.S. Representative Katie Hill was the latest victim of a form of sexual abuse that’s become increasingly common: revenge porn. Intimate photos of her were leaked to the media and published, without her consent, for the world to see – a transgression Hill suspects her estranged husband was behind. The photos implicated Hill in a...
With the presidential election season moving into high gear, campaign messaging will soon begin increasing dramatically. But for those of us who get our news from social media, a new study from the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin offers a strong warning: You can’t trust yourself to discern what’s...
People who identify as politically conservative are more like to support climate change mitigation policies if they have report experiencing personal harm from an extreme weather event such as a wildfire, flood or tornado, a new study indicates. “This study shows how personal harm from extreme weather events may be shifting the beliefs of conservatives,”...
Cannabis may be helping Canadians cope with the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), new research suggests. In an analysis of health survey data collected by Statistics Canada from more than 24,000 Canadians, researchers from the BC Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU) and University of British Columbia (UBC) found that people who have PTSD but...
