Research on art, media, religion, language, and history. Coverage follows how ideas, beliefs, and identities move through societies.
The makers of Digit Party had a score ceiling that no player could exceed, but it was sometimes higher than any real arrangement could achieve. A new mathematical solution finally lets the browser calculate the true maximum.
A study of 10 blockbuster album releases finds that US traffic fatalities rose on release days, alongside a sharp increase in music streaming. The pattern is concerning, but it cannot show that streaming, or a smartphone, directly caused any individual crash.
A Norwegian study of 747 children found that greater primary-parent smartphone use was associated with slower growth in receptive vocabulary from ages 5 to 7. Most other measures of child and parent screen use were not consistently linked to language growth.
Adults who pictured a socially connected old age went on to see more of family and friends a decade later, a Vienna-led study of 459 people found, with the expectation preceding the behaviour rather than following it.
Thirty years after a landmark study found Barbie and Ken’s proportions were almost impossible in real people, Australian researchers measured today’s dolls with the same tape and the same math. Barbie has moved a long way toward average. Ken’s waist has barely budged.
A survey of over five thousand Brazilian adults finds that deja vu, visions and out-of-body sensations follow oddly similar patterns of interpretation, and most people count the experience as a net positive within their own lives.
A survey of more than 500 Japanese gamers found no measurable genre gap by social-withdrawal risk, yet higher-risk players described favouring cooperation, absorbing stories and strategy in their own words.
Robert Boatright reads the Showa era Godzilla films of 1954 to 1975 against the first Trump presidency and its aftermath, mapping Liz Cheney onto Mothra and Ron DeSantis onto Mechagodzilla, and calls the exercise exploratory rather than settled.
New modelling in Science puts the peak at roughly ten times today’s diversity between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago — and finds the collapse began with the first multinational empires, not European colonialism. The pre-agricultural world, it turns out, had fewer languages than we do now. The authors call it a coarse global model rather than a census.
Bows and maces kept turning up in royal women’s tombs at Dahshur, and no one could say whether they were props or kit. A reassessment of six skeletons found the archery signature — thickened upper-arm and grip muscles — matching the weapons each woman was buried holding.
Brain condition challenges David Hume’s claim that abstract thought depends on mental images, forcing philosophers to reconsider how minds handle ideas like justice and geometry.
People testing AI chatbots trained on the dead preferred emotional “reincarnation” over accuracy, while warning the technology could deepen grief.