https://phys.org/science-news/ en-us The latest science news on archaeology, fossils, mathematics, and science technology from Phys.org Researchers have reconstructed and transcribed a mathematical formula from the site of Xultun, Guatemala, revealing the name of a Maya astronomer for the first time. During the Classic period (250–900 CE), mathematics and astronomy were a key part of Maya society, with complex calculations based on calendar dates and astronomical observations influencing everything from the erection of monuments to the inauguration of kings and queens. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-hidden-maya-wall-astronomer-emerges.html Archaeology Mon, 13 Jul 2026 19:00:01 EDT news702638642 In environmental, health and technology crises, Americans are more persuaded to take action by scientists and public consensus than by leaders in government and industry, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers at Boston College and Princeton University. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-scientists-citizens-persuasive-industry-mobilizing.html Social Sciences Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:00:07 EDT news703140968 One of the many marvels of the Roman world is that some of its buildings are still with us. But why have they lasted for so long when some relatively modern structures are in a state of decay after a few decades? https://phys.org/news/2026-07-emperor-hadrian-latrines-durability-roman.html Archaeology Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:30:01 EDT news703166448 Buried in the rubble outside an ancient city, archaeologists have discovered golden diadems and mouthpieces stamped with sun-crowned bulls and running ibexes. Their designs borrow from nearly every corner of the ancient Mediterranean, providing a snapshot of ancient trade in one of history's first great ages of globalization. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-year-gold-diadems-mouth-pieces.html Archaeology Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:20:07 EDT news703150118 This week, researchers reported finding nanoplastics in Antarctic soils for the first time, suggesting they were delivered via long-range atmospheric transport. A study associates the use of hormonal birth control with the risk of brain tumors. And researchers developed a new drug against metastatic prostate cancer using human proteins. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-saturday-citations-blue-zone-longevity.html Other Sat, 11 Jul 2026 09:00:04 EDT news702889645 As we move closer to Election Day 2026, voting preferences are moving back into focus—and with them, analyses of what drives partisanship at the polls. However, less frequently asked is when Americans show evidence of partisan behavior: shortly or well after reaching the legal voting age? As teenagers? In elementary school? https://phys.org/news/2026-07-children-group-evidence-privacy-bias.html Social Sciences Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:20:02 EDT news702833795 When archaeologists find adults and children buried together in medieval graves, it is often assumed that they were members of the same family. A new study from Stockholm University in Science Advances suggests otherwise. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-ancient-dna-family-assumptions-medieval.html Archaeology Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:00:04 EDT news702888069 Research simulates real-life multitasking performance to assess potential differences between men and women. When coordinating five different tasks, men ignored the conversational task more than twice as often as women, while showing similar performance to women in all other tasks. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-multitasking-ability-differ-sex-youd.html Social Sciences Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:40:08 EDT news702908063 Lovesickness was taken seriously as a distinct mental illness by physicians in the medieval Islamic world, new research shows. Islamic scholars considered lovesickness, which they called ʿishq, to be different from melancholy—unlike Galen and other physicians from ancient Greece. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-medieval-islamic-societies-lovesickness-distinct.html Archaeology Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:01:16 EDT news702835250 Major drought forced people to migrate across the Pacific beyond Samoa and Tonga and toward the Americas, scientists have discovered. With the new live-action "Moana" film hitting cinemas, a team of geographers and climate scientists from the Universities of Southampton and East Anglia has discovered the true history of the tale. The paper is published in the Journal of Pacific Archaeology. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-real-moana-story-polynesians-suddenly.html Archaeology Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:20:11 EDT news702825661 An expedition led by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society in partnership with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has obtained the first close-up images of the wreck of Quest, the last ship of famed Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, in the Labrador Sea. The images were obtained by WHOI's Falcon ROV and DSV Alvin, the first submersible to visit the wreck of Titanic 40 years ago. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-shackleton-ship-longer-sonar-shadow.html Archaeology Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:40:10 EDT news702807367 What makes people change their minds or their behavior? Social scientists spend a lot of time thinking about this question, and experiments are one of the most powerful ways to answer it. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-ai-youll-survey.html Social Sciences Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:20:06 EDT news702806835 Psychedelic drugs are known to make people highly sensitive to their surroundings. In other words, a user's mindset and immediate environment heavily shape the entire trippy experience. In a study published in the journal Psychedelic Medicine, scientists wanted to test a brand-new idea: whether an invisible backdrop of national culture, rather than just a person's local setting, could influence people's support for partisan violence after taking a psychedelic. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-fourth-july-celebrations-national-political.html Social Sciences Wed, 08 Jul 2026 14:30:01 EDT news702737327 A new study shows that relationships with artificial intelligence (AI) systems can evolve from casual conversations to bonds characterized by emotional intimacy, emotional dependence or experiences similar to a romantic breakup. The study is based on in-depth interviews with 17 people who were in romantic relationships with AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, and virtual dating platforms, such as Character.AI or Replika. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-romantic-relationships-ai-evolve-similar.html Social Sciences Wed, 08 Jul 2026 11:30:01 EDT news702728216 Around 1,800 years ago, a fossilized spinal bone lay on the windswept beaches of Roman Britain until a curious passerby picked it up and carried it far away, only to drop it in a pit. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-oldest-deliberately-fossil-ichthyosaur-roman.html Archaeology Wed, 08 Jul 2026 06:40:01 EDT news702628012 Hotter, drier weather threatens to double water bills by midcentury in some cities, according to a Stanford-led study. The research, published in Nature Sustainability, is the first to comprehensively model how climate change, infrastructure investment and household water demand can combine to compound an already growing affordability crisis. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-hotter-drier-weather-bills-cities.html Economics & Business Wed, 08 Jul 2026 05:00:09 EDT news702638393 For every King Arthur or Roland, whose adventures readers can still enjoy today, another hero of ancient literature may have been lost forever. Before the printing press, texts were copied manually. This process introduced errors and innovations. Like mutations in the replication of DNA, these manuscript changes can be used to create evolutionary trees that philologists call stemmata. Since these trees are based on the extant copies, they do not reflect the full evolutionary history of texts and cannot account for those that are completely lost. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-medieval-text-family-trees-centuries.html Archaeology Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:00:09 EDT news702639080 Clarkson University researchers have developed an artificial intelligence tool that can uncover the mathematical equations governing complex and chaotic systems directly from data. The technology, called KANDy—short for Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Dynamics—is designed to help scientists understand systems that are difficult to describe using traditional methods because they are noisy, nonlinear or highly unpredictable. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-ai-tool-equations-complex.html Mathematics Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:00:05 EDT news702638959 Images of faces created by artificial intelligence (AI) are seen as more trustworthy than images of genuine faces, researchers say, warning of the risks of online fraud and other harms. This is the first study to examine the trustworthiness of AI faces created by the latest diffusion technology. It was led by Alexis McGuire, with Paul Taylor and Sophie Nightingale from Lancaster University, Maty Bohacek from Stanford University, and Hany Farid from the University of California, Berkeley. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-ai-real-people.html Social Sciences Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:00:09 EDT news702639116 Violence, the care of injured or ill individuals, and funerary behavior are among the most challenging aspects of the human past to reconstruct. A study published in Scientific Reports and led by researchers from the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), in collaboration with colleagues from Tel Aviv University, provides new insights into these questions through the analysis of Qafzeh 25, a fossil human from Qafzeh Cave (Israel), dated to between 92,000 and 145,000 years ago. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-ancient-jaw-wound-reveals-violence.html Archaeology Tue, 07 Jul 2026 10:50:01 EDT news702638818 Tens of thousands of years ago, Homo sapiens coexisted with Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis. Many of us living today carry a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, indicating that the two species may have shared much more than just the same land. Now, a breakthrough archaeological discovery has revealed that the two species did not merely cross paths: they possibly shared a common culture that spanned more than 20,000 years. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-cave-reveal-modern-humans-neanderthals.html Archaeology Mon, 06 Jul 2026 15:00:14 EDT news702537862 Traumatic events from your childhood could have a lingering impact on your adult relationships, according to new research from the University of Georgia. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-childhood-relationships.html Social Sciences Mon, 06 Jul 2026 12:20:04 EDT news702551942 When archaeologists opened the 2,600-year-old tomb of an ancient Chinese lord, they discovered his magnificent bronze bells had been scattered, their wooden hangings broken. But the most mysterious part of all: This was apparently no accident, with the family of the tomb's owner having chosen to "deactivate" the bells when their powers were no longer needed. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-bronze-bells-chinese-lord-year.html Archaeology Sun, 05 Jul 2026 10:20:01 EDT news702053408 Why do people make the choices they do? Researchers from the Center Synergy of Systems (SynoSys) at TUD Dresden University of Technology, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and the University of Basel present their new approach to finding answers to that question. The approach combines observed choices with participants' own descriptions of their decision processes, allowing researchers to study human behavior in greater detail than is possible with behavioral data alone. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-free-text-llms-reveal-hidden.html Mathematics Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:00:01 EDT news702136906 A new ancient DNA study published in Science Advances provides evidence that political power among Scythian elites may have been inherited through family lineages that extended across multiple burial sites. By combining archaeology, anthropology and genetics, the new study offers fresh insight into how social inequality and political authority developed among ancient nomadic societies. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-newfound-family-link-scythian-elite.html Archaeology Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:00:09 EDT news702200941 Chinese goldsmiths working during the Ming Dynasty were masters of their craft, capable of creating intricate and elaborate jewelry pieces. The evidence is there in the abundance of finds in royal and noble tombs across Hubei province. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-recreate-lost-ming-dynasty-goldworking.html Archaeology Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:20:03 EDT news702287228 New research from the University of Kansas uses network science to determine why people make mistakes when lip-reading. Michael Vitevitch, professor of speech-language-hearing at KU, and his co-authors created a visual map of about 20,000 words in English, hoping to better grasp why some words are more difficult to lip-read than others. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-visual-words-reveals-lip-readers.html Mathematics Fri, 03 Jul 2026 09:20:06 EDT news702053517 Experts have unlocked secrets hidden for two hundred years in a beautiful navigational chart made for 18th century seafarers negotiating the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The paper scroll is evidence seafaring communities in the region used their own effective system of navigation that enabled trade and exchange between India, Arabia and the Horn of Africa in the age of sail, before the uptake of a more abstract, instrument-based navigation. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-centuries-experts-secrets-red-sea.html Archaeology Fri, 03 Jul 2026 03:20:01 EDT news702266873 Relationships are all about compromise. From deciding on where to eat dinner with a friend to negotiating chore lists at home, we often experience situations that require some flexibility. But what happens when we must work with others—especially people we don't know—to make a risky decision? That's what Caltech's Dean Mobbs, professor of cognitive neuroscience, and members of his lab set out to explore in a recent study. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-compromise-risky-decisions-biased-blame.html Social Sciences Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:30:02 EDT news702230102 Imagine opening a difficult book in a quiet room. The first page is dense. You read one paragraph, then reread it. Nothing "clicks" yet. Your brain is doing what learning often requires: spending effort before the reward arrives. Then your phone lights up. One thumb movement, and the situation changes completely. A joke, a message, a clip, a tiny social reward: all available instantly, all requiring almost no effort. The book has not become harder and, definitely, your intelligence has not disappeared. But the book now feels more expensive, because another activity nearby offers a much better bargain: reward now, effort almost zero. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-instant-digital-rewards-hard-worthwhile.html Social Sciences Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:40:01 EDT news702221821