News by Subject Social & Behavior

Throughout history, people have sought vibrant blue pigments. The Egyptians and Babylonians used lapis lazuli 6,000 years ago. In 1802, a French chemist synthesized cobalt blue. More recently, in 2009 scientists discovered YInMn Blue, otherwise known as "Oregon Blue." But most of these pigments have limitations in terms of cost, stability, color or toxicity. Now, researchers in ACS Omega report a new class of 'cool' blue colorants that are inexpensive, durable and more environmentally friendly.

The Pachacamac Idol of ancient Peru was a multicolored and emblematic sacred icon worshiped for almost 700 hundred years before Spanish conquest, according to a study published Jan. 15, 2020, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Marcela Sepúlveda of the University of Tarapacá, Chile, and colleagues.

Christopher Columbus' accounts of the Caribbean include descriptions of fierce raiders who abducted women and cannibalized men -- stories long dismissed as myths. But a new study of skulls suggests Columbus may have been telling the truth.

Human behavior is influenced by many things, most of which remain unconscious to us. One of these is known among perception psychologists as 'pseudo-neglect.' This refers to the observation that healthy people prefer their left visual field to their right and therefore divide a line regularly left of center. A study published on Friday, Jan. 10, shows for the first time what effect this inconspicuous deviation had in the prehistoric past.

Several passages on the Rök stone -- the world's most famous Viking Age runic monument -- suggest that the inscription is about battles and for over a hundred years, researchers have been trying to connect the inscription with heroic deeds in war. Now, thanks to an interdisciplinary research project, a new interpretation of the inscription is being presented. The study shows that the inscription deals with an entirely different kind of battle: the conflict between light and darkness, warmth and cold, life and death.

Norse Greenlanders may have chased dwindling walrus herds ever farther north in an effort to maintain their economy, when the value of walrus ivory tanked after the introduction of elephant tusks into European markets in the 1200s.

The burial of the Amazon with a head dress made of precious metal dated back to the second half of the 4th c BC was found by the staff of the Don expedition of IA RAS during the examination of the cemetery Devitsa V of Voronezh Oblast. This is the first found in Middle Don river and well preserved ceremonial headdress of a rich Scythian women, earlier archaeologists found only fragments of such head dresses.

Researchers from Aarhus University and Nanjing University have shown that cultural evolution overshadowed climate change in driving historical broad-scale megafauna dynamics across China. By mining Chinese administrative records for data on species distributions and land use alongside climate data from 2 to 1953 CE, the researchers identified the millennia-long spread of agriculture and agricultural intensification as the main cause of the extirpation of the Asiatic elephant, Asian rhinoceroses, tiger, Asiatic black bear, and brown bear.