Anthropology

In the late 16th century, two brothers from the illustrious Fugger merchant family had news from all over the world sent to them in Augsburg by mail. At the time, so-called "novellantes" compiled and wrote down news which they forwarded to wealthy subscribers such as the Fuggers, thus establishing the first commercial news medium in Europe. The Fugger brothers had these newsletters bound and compiled in annual volumes, which eventually comprised about 16,000 newsletters in German and Italian. "The collection covers the period between 1568 and 1605, precisely the time leading up to the first…

On Thursday, Gold Coast man Gable Tostee was found not guilty of the murder of a woman, Warriena Wright, who fell to her death from his unit’s balcony. The case raises questions about how common death by falling is – and how many such incidents are homicides. The prevalence of death by falling Cases of homicide by falling are rare. The US Centre for Disease Control reported in 2014 there were 33,018 deaths by falling in that country. But, of these, only four were determined to be homicides. Out of 31,240 falling deaths in 2013, only 11 were deemed homicides. Australian Bureau of Statistics…

Laterality is the preference of human beings for one side of our bodies; being left-handed or right-handed, for example, or having a preference for using one eye or ear or the other. In the view of primatologist Eder Domínguez-Ballesteros, "lateralized behavior in humans may in some way have been reflected in their technological products, in particular, in the things they made. Besides, flint knapping -inherent in our genus since the first stages in its evolution- is an excellent source of information for studying lateralization in humans." The research was conducted in the following way: "…

Our linguistic and legal obsession with “insult” and “offense” is nothing new. In 1832, Sydney resident William McLoughlin was given 50 lashes for using the word “damned” against his master. But what does McLoughlin’s case tell us about today? Welsh Rabbit and lashes from pretty fellows The word insult can be traced to the Latin insultāre “to leap upon” or “assail”. It possibly entered English via a Middle French word insulter, meaning “to insult, crow, vaunt, or triumph over; to wrong, reproach, affront”. These historical underpinnings persist in insult’s modern sense. British philosopher…

An analysis of about 1,300 peer-reviewed research articles found that few studies included men and women equally, less than one-third performed data analysis by sex, and there was wide variation in inclusion and matching of the sexes among the specialties and the journals reviewed, according to a paper JAMA Surgery. Males and females can have different postoperative outcomes, complication rates, and readmission rates, so it is important to know if sex bias is pervasive in surgery. Adequately controlling for sex as a variable with inclusion, data reporting, and data analysis is important…

Does free health care or terrific medical treatment make citizens unwilling to change their lifestyle? There is a valid argument it is true. HIV has plummeted among every demographic except gay men, who have been found to engage in risky behavior because treatment is now so good. And free health care may be causing Canadians to not engage in personal responsibility in their lifestyles.  According to a new study in PLOS Medicine, poor diet, smoking, and unwillingness to exercise contribute to about 50 percent of deaths in Canada. Lead author Dr. Doug Manuel, senior scientist at The Ottawa…

Archaeological sites speak about the everyday lives of people in other times. Yet knowing how to interpret this reality does not tend to be straightforward. We know that Palaeolithic societies lived on hunting and gathering, but the bones found in prehistoric settlements are not always the food leftovers of the societies that lived in them. Or they are not exclusively that. Peoples of this type were nomads and used to be constantly on the move across the territory, so other predators, such as hyenas or wolves, lurking around in search of food remains left by humans would be a common…

Should we be warning consumers about over-consumption of meat as well as sugar? That's the question being raised by a team of researchers from the University of Adelaide, who say meat in the modern diet offers surplus energy, and is contributing to the prevalence of global obesity. There is just one problem. The only data available is types of food, they have no idea whether the obese people ate any meat. Or any sugar. If just the availability of meat makes people obese, they have overturned everything science knows about cellular respiration. "In the analysis of obesity prevalence across 170…

Think tanks are designed to help policy makers shape decisions by giving them evidence-based information in an apolitical format. Who doesn't claim to be doing that? Though Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund were both inspired by rabid eugenics proponents who simply reframed their beliefs about the poor being vermin into the "population control" rhetoric after World War II, they still claim they are more consumer advocacy oriented than corporations that actually help people. And government-controlled panels like the International Agency for Research on Cancer agree, an expert on a…

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recently become concerned about e-cigarette use yet scarcely mention that cigarette uptake has plummeted. Cigarettes are the killer, not nicotine, but nicotine is what historically turned smoking into what the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) deems a pediatric disease. Like caffeine, nicotine is addictive. If you smoked caffeine in a cigarette, it would be incredibly toxic whereas nicotine itself is relatively harmless. And because the CDC has overreacted to e-cigarettes, they become a cool rebellious thing for teems, just…