Anthropology

Have you ever used Airbnb or other hotel replacement services when traveling? If yes, you are likely to travel more than you used to, you choose your destination from among a wider set of alternatives, and you are more active in your destination, according to a recent paper from the University of Eastern Finland and Washington State University.  The authors found that tourists are interested in peer-to-peer accommodation services like Airbnb due to social and financial reasons. Users of peer-to-peer accommodation services are often in social interaction with their hosts, and peer-to-peer…

A paper published earlier this year claiming chimpanzees can learn each others' language is not supported by others who looked at the work. The paper published in Current Biology in February centered on the examination of two sets of chimpanzees in the Edinburgh Zoo: one that had been captive for several years in the facility and one that had recently arrived from the Beekse Bergen Safari Park in the Netherlands. Over a three-year period, the researchers claimed that the latter set had altered their sounds to those of the former set when communicating about a common object, apples, resulting…

An analysis of nearly 500 anti-vaccination websites found that over two-thirds used what they represented as scientific evidence to support the idea that vaccines are dangerous and nearly one-third contained anecdotes that reinforced the perception.  As is the case among other anti-science movements, like those related to energy and agriculture, the sites contained a considerable amount of misinformation and pseudoscience, with more than two-thirds suggesting that vaccines were dangerous, just under two-thirds suggesting they cause autism and just over 4 in 10 claiming vaccines cause "…

Public health policies targeted at smokers may actually have the opposite effect for some people trying to quit, according to a paper which indicates that stigmatizing smoking can, in some cases, make it harder for people to quit because they become angry and defensive and the negative messages lead to a drop in self-esteem. The findings, a review of almost 600 articles relating to smoking self-stigma, highlight the potential for negative stereotypes to backfire, especially when it comes to public health campaigns. While the evidence shows that stigmatizing smoking may prompt some individuals…

Around 20 per cent of girls from ethnic minority backgrounds are not being vaccinated against the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) because they feel they don't need it, according to a Cancer Research UK survey presented today at the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Cancer Conference in Liverpool. The authors say this is the first study done with an ethnically diverse group of girls to look at why they are not vaccinated, or do not complete the series of injections. Researchers found that 17 percent of girls from black backgrounds and 22 percent of girls from Asian backgrounds who hadn't…

New data presented at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meetings in Dallas, Texas, implicates early humans in the extinction of large mammals, birds and lizards in Australia. The "Anthropocene" has been with us for thousands of years, it seems - and the ancestors of Australian Aborigines have been implicated in the demise of a plethora of large-bodied animals, including a huge monitor lizard, large terrestrial birds, a giant wombat, the marsupial lion, and giant kangaroos. At some point during the last Ice Age this 'megafauna' disappeared, which coincides with the first arrival of…

Scientists have deciphered maternal genetic material from two babies buried together at an Alaskan campsite 11,500 years ago and found the infants had different mothers and were the northernmost known kin to two lineages of Native Americans found farther south throughout North and South America. By showing that both genetic lineages lived so far north so long ago, the study supports the "Beringian standstill model." It says that Native Americans descended from people who migrated from Asia to Beringia - the vast Bering land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska - and then spent up to 10,…

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lost a great deal of respect when it published a study claiming female hurricane names were taken less seriously by the public. A new paper on racism in crosswalks won't add more credibility to the humanities and the social sciences about what is really happening in the world outside a p=.05 value. Luckily, PNAS did not publish this one, Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behavior did. The authors claim that a driver choosing to stop for a pedestrian in a crosswalk has to do with the pedestrian's race - yes, skin color…

They stayed up late into the evening, averaged less than 6.5 hours of sleep a night and rarely napped. College students during final exams? Working moms? No, says a UCLA-led team of researchers who studied sleeping patterns among traditional peoples whose lifestyles closely resemble those of our evolutionary ancestors. Instead it was pre-industrial humans, according to a team that studied the Hadza of Tanzania, the San of Namibia and the Tsimane of Bolivia challenges conventional wisdom about their sleeping habits. The findings, published today in Current Biology, suggest that the…

Genetic ancestry, as well as facial characteristics, may play an important part in who we select as mates, according to an analysis that used population genomics and social science data to gauge the relatedness of parents in a study of asthma in Mexican and Puerto Rican children.  But the researchers did not genotype the parents of the 2,757 trios they studied - about 1,246 of which were Mexican trios and 1,511 Puerto Rican trios - but rather inferred their relatedness through their children, who were genotyped. They also used a smaller study of 489 trios, in which both parents and…