Playing professional football games in empty stadiums had a hugely negative effect on the success of home teams, with home advantage almost halved, new research shows. Home advantage describes the benefit a sports team playing at their own venue is said to enjoy over the visiting team. This could be attributed to the effect of...
After years of pressure, Germany recently announced that an agreement had been reached to return hundreds of priceless artefacts and artworks that had been looted from Nigeria in colonial times and were on display in German museums. Commonly called the Benin Bronzes, these beautiful and technically remarkable artworks have come to symbolise the broader restitution...
We think of leaders and influencers as imbued with special skills and qualities – either innate or hard-won merit – that propels them to success, high status and financial rewards. Self-help books on how to build leadership skills abound. However, new research that models the evolution of social networks suggests it is less about individual skills and...
In the popular imagination, New York City is a mass of soaring steel-frame skyscrapers. But many of the city’s 1 million buildings are not that modern. Behind their brick-and-mortar facades, its numerous 19th- and early 20th-century warehouses, commercial buildings and row homes are framed with massive wooden joists and beams. These structures probably harbor at...
My prepandemic summers were always packed with travel – trips to Europe for work and play, and, most recently, a road trip across the American West. At the end of a sweltering day of activities, I’d routinely wind down with some social drinking. In recent years, though, I started to notice a shift. Beer lists...
Spying is a risky profession. For the 14th-century English undercover agent-turned-poet Geoffrey Chaucer, the dangers – at least to his reputation – continue to surface centuries after his death. In his July 2021 essay for the Times Literary Supplement, A.S.G. Edwards, professor of medieval manuscripts at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, laments the...
A few males are enough to fertilise all the females. The number of males therefore has little bearing on a population’s growth. However, they are important for purging bad mutations from the population. This is shown by a new Uppsala University study providing in-depth knowledge of the possible long-term genetic consequences of sexual selection. The...
New research from Syracuse University Newhouse School of Public Communications reveals a relationship between political biases and attitudes about sexual assault. Authored by assistant professor Rebecca Ortiz and PhD student Andrea Smith, the article “A social identity threat perspective on why partisans may engage in greater victim blaming and sexual assault myth acceptance in the...
Researchers at the University of Adelaide are concerned video sharing platforms such as YouTube could be contributing to the normalisation of exotic pets and encouraging the exotic pet trade. In a study, published in PLOS ONE, researchers analysed the reactions of people to videos on YouTube involving human interactions with exotic animals and found those reactions...
Men were more likely to be the spouse with the most knowledge of a couple’s finances in 2016 than they were in 1992 – especially in wealthy couples, a new study suggests. Results come from a survey that interviewed the spouse in mixed-sex married couples that was identified by a household member as “more knowledgeable...
