The ratio between the body circumference at the waist and the hips (or WHR) is a secondary sexual trait that is unique to humans and is well known to influence men’s mate preferences. Because a woman's WHR also provides information about her age, health and fertility, men's prefe … | Continue reading
This paper studies differences in the effect of temperature on cognitive performance by gender in a large controlled lab experiment (N = 543). We study performance in math, verbal and cognitive reflection tasks and find that the effects of temperature vary significantly across me … | Continue reading
Online communities are virtual spaces for users to share interests, support others, and to exchange knowledge and information. Understanding user behavior is valuable to organizations and has applications from marketing to security, for instance, identifying leaders within a comm … | Continue reading
In an online Qualtrics panel survey experiment (N = 1620), we found that scientists posting self-portraits (“selfies”) to Instagram from the science lab/field were perceived as significantly warmer and more trustworthy, and no less competent, than scientists posting photos of onl … | Continue reading
To demonstrate and describe fetal head molding and brain shape changes during delivery, we used three-dimensional (3D) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and 3D finite element mesh reconstructions to compare the fetal head between prelabor and the second stage of labor. A total of … | Continue reading
Originally, online public engagement with science tended to be one directional—from experts to the general population via news media. Such an arrangement allowed for little to no direct interaction between the public and scientists. However, the emergence of social media has open … | Continue reading
Human personality may substantially affect the nature of care provided to dependants. This link has been well researched in parents and children, however, relatively little is known about this dynamic with regards to humans’ relationships with non-human animals. Owner interaction … | Continue reading
Author summary The origin of avian flight in the perspective of mechanics has been investigated for the first time. We reported the first evidence for flapping hypothesis based on principle of physical modeling. This is significant because using modal effective mass method and re … | Continue reading
The phenomenon of ‘microdosing’, that is, regular ingestion of very small quantities of psychedelic substances, has seen a rapid explosion of popularity in recent years. Individuals who microdose report minimal acute effects from these substances yet claim a range of long-term ge … | Continue reading
Scientific research is often thought of as being conducted by individuals and small teams striving for disciplinary advances. Yet as a whole, this endeavor more closely resembles a complex and integrated system of people, papers, and ideas. Studies of co-authorship and citation n … | Continue reading
Intra-gastric balloons (IGB) have become an efficient and less invasive method for obesity treatment. The use of traditional IGBs require complex insertion tools and flexible endoscopes to place and remove the balloon inside the patient’s stomach, which may cause discomfort and c … | Continue reading
Improving diet quality while simultaneously reducing environmental impact is a critical focus globally. Metrics linking diet quality and sustainability have typically focused on a limited suite of indicators, and have not included food waste. To address this important research ga … | Continue reading
Author summary The main task of perceptual systems is to make truthful inferences about the environment. The sensory input to these systems is often astonishingly imprecise, which makes human perception prone to error. Nevertheless, numerous studies have reported that humans ofte … | Continue reading
This Perspective article asserts that the most prestigious journals publish the least reliable science, and asks how long we can afford to reward scientists for publishing there. | Continue reading
Many bacterial pathogens hijack macrophages to spread away from infection sites. This study suggests that macrophages are attracted to the site of infection by a combination of chemotaxis and galvanotaxis; after phagocytosis of bacteria, surface electrical properties of the macro … | Continue reading
College students’ study strategies were explored by tracking the ways they navigated the websites of two large (Ns of 1384 and 671) online introductory psychology courses. Students’ study patterns were measured analyzing the ways they clicked outside of the regularly scheduled cl … | Continue reading
The U.S. art museum sector is grappling with diversity. While previous work has investigated the demographic diversity of museum staffs and visitors, the diversity of artists in their collections has remained unreported. We conduct the first large-scale study of artist diversity … | Continue reading
Author summary Machine learning-based analysis of human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) patterns has enabled the visualization of perceptual content. However, prior work visualizing perceptual contents from brain activity has failed to combine visual information of m … | Continue reading
Content shared on social media platforms can impact public perceptions of wildlife. These perceptions, which are in part shaped by context (e.g. non-naturalistic setting, presence of a human), can influence people’s desires to interact with or acquire wild animals as pets. Howeve … | Continue reading
The advent of social networks revolutionized the way people access to information sources. Understanding the complex relationship between these sources and users is crucial. We introduce an algorithm, that we call PopRank, to assess both the Impact of Facebook pages as well as us … | Continue reading
A major bottleneck in biological discovery is now emerging at the computational level. Cloud computing offers a dynamic means whereby small and medium-sized laboratories can rapidly adjust their computational capacity. We benchmarked two established cloud computing services, Amaz … | Continue reading
Explaining the processes underlying the emergence of monument construction is a major theme in contemporary anthropological archaeology, and recent studies have employed spatially-explicit modeling to explain these patterns. Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) is famous for its elabo … | Continue reading
The Global Gender Gap Index is one of the best-known measures of national gender inequality, used by both academics and policy makers. We argue that that this measure has a number of problems and introduce a simpler measure of national levels of gender inequality. Our proposed me … | Continue reading
The English language has evolved dramatically throughout its lifespan, to the extent that a modern speaker of Old English would be incomprehensible without translation. One concrete indicator of this process is the movement from irregular to regular (-ed) forms for the past tense … | Continue reading
Scientists waste substantial time writing grant proposals, potentially squandering much of the scientific value of funding programs. This Meta-Research Article shows that, unfortunately, grant-proposal competitions are inevitably inefficient when the number of awards is small, bu … | Continue reading
Our natural body odor goes through several stages of age-dependent changes in chemical composition as we grow older. Similar changes have been reported for several animal species and are thought to facilitate age discrimination of an individual based on body odors, alone. We soug … | Continue reading
Effective symptom management is a critical component of cancer treatment. Computational tools that predict the course and severity of these symptoms have the potential to assist oncology clinicians to personalize the patient’s treatment regimen more efficiently and provide more a … | Continue reading
One way in which people may cope with sadness is to seek positive social contact. We examined whether subtle reminders of Facebook increase positive mood and thus attenuate the interest in social activities that is typically enhanced by sad mood induction. Participants watched ei … | Continue reading
Machine Learning Special Issue Guest Editors Suchi Saria, Atul Butte, and Aziz Sheikh cut through the hyperbole with an accessible and accurate portrayal of the forefront of machine learning in clinical translation. | Continue reading
Open source software is becoming crucial in the design and testing of quantum algorithms. Many of the tools are backed by major commercial vendors with the goal to make it easier to develop quantum software: this mirrors how well-funded open machine learning frameworks enabled th … | Continue reading
The Internet of Things (or IoT), which enables the networked interconnection of everyday objects, is becoming increasingly popular in many aspects of our lives ranging from entertainment to health care. While the IoT brings a set of invaluable advantages and opportunities with it … | Continue reading
The Sharing Economy (SE) is a growing ecosystem focusing on peer-to-peer enterprise. In the SE the information available to assist individuals (users) in making decisions focuses predominantly on community-generated trust and reputation information. However, how such information … | Continue reading
Facebook, the online social network, has more than 2 billion global users. Because those users do not pay for the service, its benefits are hard to measure. We report the results of a series of three non-hypothetical auction experiments where winners are paid to deactivate their … | Continue reading
Introduction Low-calorie sweetener use for weight control has come under increasing scrutiny as obesity, especially abdominal obesity, remain entrenched despite substantial low-calorie sweetener use. We evaluated whether chronic low-calorie sweetener use is a risk factor for abdo … | Continue reading
Author summary Prion diseases or transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) are incurable brain diseases caused by conformational changes in the endogenous prion protein. Prions can be transmitted through contaminated food, surgical instruments and blood. Transmission of pr … | Continue reading
To what extent does our online activity reveal who we are? Recent research has demonstrated that the digital traces left by individuals as they browse and interact with others online may reveal who they are and what their interests may be. In the present paper we report a systema … | Continue reading
Human intelligence comprises comprehension of and reasoning about an infinitely variable external environment. A brain capable of large variability in neural configurations, or states, will more easily understand and predict variable external events. Entropy measures the variety … | Continue reading
Debates over the pros and cons of a “publish or perish” philosophy have inflamed academia for at least half a century. Growing concerns, in particular, are expressed for policies that reward “quantity” at the expense of “quality,” because these might prompt scientists to unduly m … | Continue reading
General-purpose computers have become ubiquitous and important for everyday life, but they are difficult for people with paralysis to use. Specialized software and personalized input devices can improve access, but often provide only limited functionality. In this study, three re … | Continue reading
This research expands efforts to understand differences in NIH funding associated with the self-identified race and ethnicity of applicants. We collected data from 2,397 NIH Biographical Sketches submitted between FY 2003 and 2006 as part of new NIH R01 Type 1 applications to obt … | Continue reading
Laplacian mixture models identify overlapping regions of influence in unlabeled graph and network data in a scalable and computationally efficient way, yielding useful low-dimensional representations. By combining Laplacian eigenspace and finite mixture modeling methods, they pro … | Continue reading
Author SummaryIn temperate regions influenza epidemics recur with marked seasonality: in the northern hemisphere the influenza season spans November to March, while in the southern hemisphere epidemics last from May until September. Although seasonality is one of the most familia … | Continue reading
Criminal investigations often use photographic evidence to identify suspects. Here we combined robust face perception and high-resolution photography to mine face photographs for hidden information. By zooming in on high-resolution face photographs, we were able to recover images … | Continue reading