News by Subject Social & Behavior

The magnificent London mansion of Thomas Cromwell has been revealed for the first time in an artist's impression, following a new study which examines the building in unprecedented detail. Dr Nick Holder, a historian and research fellow at English Heritage and the University of Exeter, has scrutinized an exceptionally rich source of information, including letters, leases, surveys and inventories, to present the most thorough insight to-date on "one of the most spectacular private houses" in 1530s London.

A novel analysis into the acoustical similarities between Yorùbá vocalizations and a west African instrument called the dùndún found a high degree of correlation. The researchers discovered that the talking drum mimics the microstructure of the tonal language and can be categorized into four different modes. In addition, the study emphasizes the value of studying non-western culture to understand various phenomena in mainstream musicology and linguistics that go beyond western domains.

A new study from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania investigated the ways that institutions control who has access to Wi-Fi. The findings indicate that powerful institutions and privileged people use quality-of-life policing -- the report and/or arrest of individuals engaged in nonviolent offenses such as loitering, noise violations, and public intoxication -- to keep those with less privilege, including people of color, from accessing resources like the internet.

The discovery of a Roman road submerged in the Venice Lagoon is reported in Scientific Reports this week.

In Philadelphia, when a home received repairs through a city-funded program, total crime dropped by 21.9% on that block, and as the number of repaired houses on a block increased, instances of crime fell even further, according to research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania published today in JAMA Network Open.

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine have developed a computerized decision analytic model to compare projected outcomes of three vaccine strategies: a patient opts for a messenger RNA vaccine, a patient decides to get an adenovirus vector vaccine or the patient simply forgoes a vaccine altogether.