Swedish researchers studying how music affects the human body have found that when people sing in a choir their heartbeats become synchronized and their pulses increase and decrease in unison. Until now, choral singing’s effects on health have not been the subject of detailed investigation. The researchers, from the University of Gothenburg, believe their research […]
After decades of trying to shoehorn menopause into a variety of evolutionary contexts that never seemed to add up, a team of Canadian scientists from McMaster University has concluded that what really causes menopause in women is men. Lead researcher on the new study, evolutionary geneticist Rama Singh, says that until now, no one has […]
Radios, gunfire, explosions, and live voices all combine during combat to create extreme auditory overload for military personnel, but defense researchers think they may have a solution – the humble text message. The use of text messages to improve command and control operations was explored recently by a team of researchers at Defence Research and […]
Researchers from the University of Southampton (UK) have been investigating how blind and visually impaired people can use echolocation, the navigational sonar used by bats and dolphins, to determine the location of objects. The study appears in the journal Hearing Research. For the study, the researchers worked with sighted and blind human listeners using a […]
A new analysis (of data from the General Social Survey) suggests sex is like income: people are generally happy when they keep pace with the Joneses and they’re even happier if they get a bit more. The work, by sociologist Tim Wadsworth at the University of Colorado Boulder, appears in Social Indicators Research. Analyzing the […]
A computer analysis of more than five million digitized books has revealed a distinct stylistic divergence since the 1960s, with American books becoming decidedly more “emotional.” That’s according to researchers from the Universities of Bristol, Sheffield, and Durham, who looked at how the use of “mood” words in books has changed over time. Their study […]
Confirming what many of us have long suspected, a new study in the journal PLOS ONE has found that a one-sided cellphone conversation in the background is much more distracting than overhearing a conversation between two people. Conducted by Veronica Galván and colleagues from the University of San Diego, the study examined the effects on […]
Charles Darwin speculated that language might have had its origins in singing and now linguists from MIT are taking that theory a step further by proposing that human language could be a grafting of two communication forms found in the animal kingdom. Writing in Frontiers in Psychology, the scientists suggest that human language is a […]
A new DNA system employed to analyze modern forensic samples has also been used to establish facial characteristics from centuries old human remains. A study in the journal Investigative Genetics details how the HIrisPlex DNA analysis system was able to reconstruct hair and eye color from teeth up to 800 years old. According to its […]
Social practices and cultural beliefs of modern life are preventing healthy brain and emotional development in children, according to an interdisciplinary body of research presented at a symposium at the University of Notre Dame. “Life outcomes for American youth are worsening, especially in comparison to 50 years ago,” says Darcia Narvaez, Notre Dame professor of […]
