Using laser-guided imaging to peer through dense jungle forests, Tulane University researchers have uncovered vast unexplored Maya settlements in Mexico and a better understanding of the ancient civilization’s extent and complexity. The new research, published in the journal Antiquity, was led by Tulane University anthropology doctoral student Luke Auld-Thomas and his advisor, Professor Marcello A. Canuto. The team used...
The first study of how Wikipedia represents Australian places has highlighted how aspects of the online encyclopedia and choices made by the volunteer editors who work on it can lead to absences, omissions and sanitised views in articles about Australia. As part of a 3-year Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project, the University of Technology...
A long, wooden boat puttered down the Indio River’s chocolate waters carrying Ana María Antonio and a colleague from the Panama Canal Authority on a mission to hear directly from villagers who could be affected by plans to dam the river. The canal forms the backbone of Panama’s economy, and the proposed dam would secure...
During a campaign speech in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 19, 2024, Donald Trump promised to save the country from immigrants: “I will rescue every town across America that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in a jail or kick them out of our country.” Depicting immigrants as...
In a paper published in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, an international team of researchers looked at how science could play a more active role in managing crises. The paper builds on the outcomes of the international conference “What Role for Science in Crisis Times? Outlook in the Health, Environment, and Agriculture Interconnected Areas”, held in Montpellier in...
Changing precipitation patterns in the Neotropics, one of Earth’s most biodiverse regions, could threaten two-thirds of the area’s bird species by the year 2100 if climate change goes unchecked, according to new research led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and George Mason University. This would represent a dramatic loss, as the region is home to 30% of...
Cellphone chats have become death sentences in the continuing, bloody factional war inside Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel. Cartel gunmen stop youths on the street or in their cars and demand their phones. If they find a contact who’s a member of a rival faction, a chat with a wrong word or a photo with the wrong...
Sediment and pebbles are all that’s left on the earth around much of Bernardino Mosquera’s small riverside community in northwest Colombia’s Choco region. Just a year ago, healthy shrubs and trees filled this important biodiversity spot teeming with species native to the land. But then illegal miners arrived, using their heavy machinery to dredge the...
The sudden emergence of witch trials in early modern Europe may have been fueled by one of humanity’s most significant intellectual milestones: the invention of the printing press in 1450. A recent study in Theory and Society shows that the printing of witch-hunting manuals, particularly the Malleus maleficarum in 1487, played a crucial role in spreading persecution across Europe. The study...
Diego Javier Luis, Johns Hopkins University Across the United States, the second Monday of October is increasingly becoming known as Indigenous Peoples Day. In the push to rename Columbus Day, Christopher Columbus himself has become a metaphor for the evils of early colonial empires, and rightly so. The Italian explorer who set out across the...
