News by Subject Social & Behavior

An historical document clearly indicates that the Hosokawa clan of Japan's Kokura Domain stopped producing wine in 1632, the year before the shogunate ordered them to move to the Higo Domain. Researchers believe the reason for halting wine production was directly related to the move and because wine was considered a drink of Christianity, which was harshly suppressed at that time in Japan.

Phosphorous, calcium and charcoal in spotty patches of fertile soil in the Amazon rainforest suggest that natural processes such as fires and river flooding, not the ingenuity of indigenous populations, created rare sites suitable for agriculture, according to new research.

Black children are removed from their families at much greater rates than any other race or ethnicity in this country. At the same time the sheer number of all child abuse investigations in the US is staggering: experts estimate that by age 18 one out of three children has been the subject of a child protective services investigation. Yet, many of these investigations and removals are unjustified, says University of Rochester health policy historian and physician Mical Raz.

Researchers from McMaster University have studied and analyzed thousands of weekly records documenting the deaths of smallpox victims in London, England over the span of nearly 300 years. The analysis provides new and rare insights into the ecology of infectious disease, establishing that the time between epidemics, the size of the outbreaks, and even the season when the epidemics occurred, changed over the centuries.

Late 19th century misconceptions about outbreaks of plague in the ancient world led to an ingrained belief that pandemics inherently cause widespread death and change the course of history, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Maryland's National-Socio Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.