One of 8 fields we read

Social Sciences

72 discoveries published so far

October 6, 2026 A pond alga's light sensor wins the Nobel The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Karl Deisseroth (55, Stanford), Peter Hegemann (72, Humboldt University) and Georg Nagel (73, University of Würzburg) for optogenetics.
October 5, 2026 A savings plan that cut heavy drinking by 26% in Kenya A randomized controlled trial in Kenya gave participants a savings intervention with lottery-based interest, goal-setting support and savings reminders.
September 28, 2026 What medieval Swedish graves actually reveal about family Stockholm University researchers ran DNA on 142 people from the late Viking Age and Middle Ages, pulled from graves at Sigtuna near Stockholm, Västerhus in Jämtland, and Fjälkinge in Skåne, more than 60 of them children.
September 26, 2026 The clearest evidence yet on whether social media wrecks your mood A team led by Kostadin Kushlev tracked 1,966 US adults across five survey waves, one every three months, measuring how often they used ten different social technologies alongside their life satisfaction, published in Nature.
September 25, 2026 Colleges are teaching friendship like a skill, because loneliness is rising fast A political science professor noticed silent classrooms where students stared at phones instead of each other, and the numbers backed up the feeling: in a 2026 national survey of over 40,000 college students, nearly 6 in 10 said they felt lonely sometimes or always, while the share of Americans socializing in person on an average day fell from 38 percent in 2015 to 30 percent in 2025.
September 19, 2026 A $200 pen that could catch Parkinson's before the doctor can Among a fresh cohort of grants from Emergent Ventures India, one entry stands out for its sheer audacity: a 17-year-old named Arnav, from Navi Mumbai, received funding to build a diagnostic pen meant to screen for Parkinson's disease for around $200, as an alternative to a scan that currently costs $3,000.
September 19, 2026 Learning a language may be the cognitive workout your aging brain actually wants A linguist who studies language loss across the lifespan lays out why picking up a new language may be a sharper cognitive workout than the usual advice of crosswords or Sudoku.
September 17, 2026 A hundred years of chicken parm and a saint's feast day This month, New York's Feast of San Gennaro turns 100.
September 14, 2026 A stranger in the hallway can change a kid's whole trajectory Communities In Schools places a coordinator inside high-poverty schools whose entire job is matching struggling students to whatever they actually need, tutoring, mental health counseling, a stable place to live, and it now reaches 2 million students a year, making it the largest program of its kind in the country.
September 12, 2026 How Much Suffering Is in a Single Bite, and Why Small Animals Carry Most of It A new analysis from researcher Chris Bryant and the animal welfare group Faunalytics tried to answer a question that had never been quantified cleanly: how much suffering is packed into a pound of chicken versus a pound of beef.
September 11, 2026 The world's largest wildlife bridge is about to open over one of America's deadliest freeways In December, the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing will open over the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles, ten lanes of traffic that have spent decades cutting mountain lions, coyotes, deer, and black bears off from mates and territory on the other side.
September 9, 2026 India's wild lions are no longer fighting extinction, they're fighting for room Gujarat's most recent lion count, taken in May 2025, found 891 Asiatic lions, up from 674 just five years earlier, a 32 percent jump for an animal found wild nowhere else on Earth.
September 5, 2026 The same 20 people at a dog park are quietly doing what the corner bar used to do A University of Pennsylvania pediatrician describes Harford Park in Wayne, Pennsylvania, 30 acres set aside for off-leash dogs since 1997, where the same 15 or 20 regulars show up most afternoons.
September 3, 2026 Goats, Sheep and Cattle Are Now Wildfire Crews Across the American West, cattle, goats and sheep are being deployed with purpose: eating down the tall, dry grasses that would otherwise fuel a wildfire.
September 2, 2026 Fort Collins found a way to talk about weed and not scream at each other For 20 years, college students at Colorado State University's Center for Public Deliberation have run structured public conversations for their town, more than 500 of them, on subjects from marijuana dispensaries to poverty and the environment.
September 1, 2026 Worms move faster through tight tunnels than open water, and it could reshape how robots are built A physicist in Saad Bhamla's lab at Georgia Tech studies California blackworms, aquatic creatures a few centimeters long that tangle themselves into living, wriggling bundles.
August 31, 2026 Bones of Egyptian princesses point to female archers, not decoration Six royal mummies excavated at Dahshur in the 1890s, then lost to scholarship for over a century before resurfacing in a 2020 museum curation project, are now telling a different story than their tombs' inventory cards suggested.
August 31, 2026 A 6-meter serpent painted onto stone as colonization arrived On the ceiling of a rock shelter in Australia's Arnhem Land hangs a Rainbow Serpent more than six meters long, crocodile-headed, teeth bared, one of the largest such paintings archaeologist Paul Taçon has recorded in 40 years of fieldwork in the region.
August 28, 2026 A sewage-choked lake in Chennai, and the 2,000 people who wouldn't let it stay that way By 2016, residents of Chitlapakkam, a neighborhood near Chennai, were buying water in cans while a 50-acre lake sat rotting behind their homes, so choked with sewage and water hyacinth that locals had renamed it Saakadai Eri, the Sewage Lake.
August 28, 2026 A spy satellite's leftover hardware becomes NASA's newest window on the universe Sunday morning, weather allowing, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy will lift the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope off the pad at Kennedy Space Center.
August 27, 2026 The cancer everyone called undruggable On August 26, the FDA approved daraxonrasib, sold as Rasonque, for advanced pancreatic cancer.
August 23, 2026 The Basque factory town where the workers own the company Mondragón Corporation, headquartered in Spain's Basque Country, pulled in €11.3 billion in revenue and more than €600 million in profit in 2025, and none of it went to a small group of shareholders.
August 20, 2026 America just recorded its lowest murder rate ever measured The FBI has confirmed that 2025's murder rate came in at 4.1 per 100,000 people, tying 1955 and 1956 for the lowest ever recorded, and marking the largest single-year drop in murder and violent crime in the data's history.
August 17, 2026 A country that quietly became much safer Mogadishu is building again.
August 16, 2026 America's obesity rate just started falling For twenty-five years the number only moved one direction.
August 15, 2026 "It's all in your head" turns out to be the reassuring answer, not the dismissive one People with functional neurological disorder, whose seizures, tremors, or paralysis are real but whose scans and EEGs come back normal, have spent years being told nothing is actually wrong with them.
August 14, 2026 Centuries-old stone buildings are surviving wildfires better than they look During Spain's first-ever national wildfire emergency this summer, the 650-year-old wall of the Monasterio de San Jerónimo de Guisando acted as a firebreak and stopped the blaze's advance entirely, doing exactly what a thick masonry wall is supposed to do.
August 9, 2026 The first mRNA flu shot just got approved, a year after officials tried to kill the technology On August 5, 2025, HHS canceled 22 mRNA vaccine projects worth about $500 million.
August 7, 2026 The first mRNA flu shot just cleared the FDA, a year after the government tried to kill the technology On August 5, the FDA approved mFlusiva, the first influenza vaccine ever built on mRNA, for adults 50 and older.
August 5, 2026 The world's roads have gotten dramatically safer, even as a billion more cars hit them Cars still kill about 1.16 million people a year worldwide, more than the population of San Jose, and road injuries remain the leading cause of death for everyone between 5 and 29.
August 5, 2026 An orb-weaver's silk is becoming a material for healing wounds A spider's web isn't one material but several, engineered by the animal itself: strong frame silk for structure, a separate stretchable silk for the sticky capture spiral, and other silks reserved for egg cases and safety lines that catch a falling spider mid-drop.
August 3, 2026 An abandoned Las Vegas golf course is becoming Nevada's largest affordable housing project The Badlands Golf Club opened in 1995 in Las Vegas, wound down around neighboring mansions, and then closed in the aftermath of the 2008 recession as America's appetite for golf collapsed.
August 1, 2026 A synthetic molecular brace shows promise against the toxic protein clumps behind Parkinson's Toxic clumps of a protein called alpha-synuclein are one of the primary drivers of the neuron damage in Parkinson's disease, and current treatments only manage symptoms rather than touching that underlying process.
August 1, 2026 Getting outside during the workday measurably lifts mood, even without a hike A researcher who spent spring 2026 studying urban landscapes in Denmark, consistently ranked among the world's happiest countries, noticed that green space there wasn't treated as a special destination but as something woven into ordinary routines: eating lunch in a courtyard, walking through a park on the way home, pausing for a few minutes between errands.
July 31, 2026 India's ancient banyan trees are keystone species holding up entire ecosystems Earlier this year, scientists used high-precision radiocarbon dating to confirm that a banyan tree in Bihar's Munger district is around 700 years old, the oldest accurately dated banyan ever identified, and one that has outlived its original trunk entirely through a spreading network of aerial roots.
July 29, 2026 Native American high schools just hit their highest graduation rates ever recorded High schools funded or managed by the Bureau of Indian Education posted the highest average graduation rates in the agency's history for the 2025-26 senior class: eight schools graduated every single senior, and thirteen more hit 90 percent or higher.
July 28, 2026 A walk built around looking for birds does more for your mood than an ordinary walk Researchers at Morehouse College measured mindfulness in college students before and after sending them on one of three activities: a walk specifically to spot birds, a general nature walk, or watching a nature documentary indoors.
July 27, 2026 South America just posted its lowest hunger rate on record A UN Food and Agriculture Organisation report released July 21 found that hunger in South America has fallen by a third since 2020, the fastest decline of any region on Earth, down to just 3.5% of the population, the lowest level ever recorded there.
July 24, 2026 The organ shortage is shrinking from two directions at once Right now, more than 104,000 Americans are waiting for a kidney, and 17 die every day before one arrives.
July 23, 2026 Bringing the American chestnut back after a century-long fight Before a fungal blight arrived from Asia in 1904 and started killing trees at the Bronx Zoo, the American chestnut was one of the great trees of Appalachian forests, sometimes 150 feet tall, feeding wildlife and Indigenous peoples and settlers alike with its nuts.
July 22, 2026 The "terrible twos" are actually a toddler discovering they're a person A 2-year-old screaming on the floor over socks isn't malfunctioning, according to early-childhood researcher Angela Sipf: they're discovering, for the first time, that they exist as someone separate from everyone else, capable of making their own choices.
July 21, 2026 The Great Lakes cleanup that both parties keep protecting Since 2010, the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative has funneled more than $5 billion into cleaning up the lakes that hold about a fifth of the world's available surface fresh water and supply drinking water to over 40 million people.
July 20, 2026 Building fancy new apartments turns out to help the people who could never afford them The mechanism has a dull name, filtering, but the effect is anything but: when someone moves into a new luxury unit, they vacate their old one, and that vacancy ripples down the chain.
July 19, 2026 Congress passed the biggest housing law in 30 years, aimed at the "housing theory of everything" On July 11, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law, after passing the Senate 85-5 and the House 358-32.
July 19, 2026 Self-driving cars are already dramatically safer, and the data is starting to pile up Across 220 million real-world miles in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta, Waymo vehicles have logged 94 percent fewer serious injuries, 82 percent fewer airbag deployments, and 93 percent fewer pedestrian injuries than matched human driving, according to a joint analysis with the insurer Swiss Re.
July 16, 2026 America braced for a World Cup transit meltdown, and its trains and buses just... worked Critics doubted US cities could move the largest single sporting event in human history around without cars, especially a country where the average person spends about half a month a year behind the wheel.
July 15, 2026 A queer teen love story is quietly healing its adult fans Two sisters who study sociology and English, both queer, spent two years interviewing more than 50 fans of the Netflix series "Heartstopper," ranging in age from 18 to 74, about what the show meant to them.
July 13, 2026 American teenagers today are dramatically safer than the ones we're nostalgic for The teen birth rate hit a record high of 61.8 per 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19 in 1991; by 2025 it had fallen 81 percent, about half a million fewer teen births every year.
July 11, 2026 Dementia rates have quietly been falling for decades Forty years ago, three in ten Americans aged 85 to 89 had dementia.
July 10, 2026 A country that once had 70 percent of its children stunted now has almost none A newly published dataset, compiled by Eric Schneider and colleagues, traces childhood stunting, being too short for your age due to malnutrition and illness, back more than a century, further than researchers have ever been able to measure it before.
July 8, 2026 A gravestone that had been there for nearly three hundred years During a restoration project at the Granary Burying Ground, Boston's third-oldest cemetery, conservationist Kelly Thomas was reviewing photographs of headstones when she noticed something unusual: one stone had only a single name.
July 5, 2026 America's death rate just hit a 125-year record low The US Centers for Disease Control released provisional data showing the American death rate in 2025 was 689.2 deaths per 100,000 people.
July 2, 2026 Pigs and Their Unlikely Defenders An unusual coalition has emerged in Washington against a bill called the Save Our Bacon Act, which would override state laws banning extreme confinement of pigs.
June 27, 2026 Brains Synchronize When People Connect, and It Could Fight Loneliness A ten-year body of research by neuroscientists at NYU has confirmed something that sounds poetic but turns out to be literal: when people are genuinely engaged with each other face to face, their brainwaves physically synchronize.
June 27, 2026 Beavers Fixed London's Flooding for Free In 2023, five beavers were released into Paradise Fields, a 10-hectare former golf course in Ealing, west London.
June 27, 2026 Ancient Humans Thrived in Rainforests, Rewriting the Origin Story The standard story of human evolution placed our species emerging on East African savannas and avoiding tropical rainforests until agriculture made survival in those environments possible, roughly 12,000 years ago.
June 27, 2026 Italy's Forests Are Bigger Than Its Farmland for the First Time Since the Middle Ages Italy now has more woodland than agricultural land, 60,000 square miles of forest covering the peninsula, a milestone that has not been true since the Middle Ages.
June 26, 2026 When you eat matters more than you thought A Mass General study used a tightly controlled "constant routine" protocol, stripping out sleep, light exposure, activity, and every other behavioral variable, to isolate what the body's own clock does to how you burn food.
June 22, 2026 Half of older adults improve over time, and science is starting to map why A Yale study that tracked adults over 65 for years found that nearly half of them improved physically, mentally, or both over time.
June 19, 2026 Two familiar drugs are doing far more than their labels say Two separate analyses this week found that widely available drugs are doing something significant beyond their original purpose.
June 19, 2026 AI predicted every World Cup match wrong. Humans did better. USA Today asked Microsoft's Copilot to predict four World Cup matches this week.
June 18, 2026 Giving Immigrant Children Citizenship at Birth Cuts Youth Crime by 70% Germany changed its citizenship law on January 1, 2000.
June 17, 2026 Pet Snakes and the Factory Farms Nobody Sees Between 2018 and 2024, American households with pet snakes grew from about 810,000 to 1.3 million.
June 17, 2026 Microplastics: What We Know, and What Actually Helps Penn State researchers tracking microplastics through Pennsylvania's rivers and reservoirs found that concentrations in sediment have been doubling every 20 years.
June 16, 2026 Dementia Is More Preventable Than We Think In a 27-site U.S.
June 15, 2026 Cancer's last walls are starting to come down Two separate pieces tell variations of the same story.
June 15, 2026 Mangroves are back, and dinner scraps are building oyster reefs Scientists announced that the world's mangrove forests, which had been losing ground for decades, have staged a remarkable global recovery.
June 15, 2026 The Squamish Nation solved something Vancouver couldn't Just beyond central Vancouver, the Squamish Nation is building Senakw, one of the largest and most unusual housing developments in the world, and making substantial money doing it.
June 14, 2026 The People We Interbred with 40,000 Years Ago Are Still Running Part of Our Immune Systems Everything we physically know about the Denisovans fits in a small box: a finger bone, a few teeth, a jawbone, all from Siberia.
June 14, 2026 New York City Hit Its 2030 Food Climate Goals Four Years Early In 2019, New York City set a target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from government food purchasing by 33 percent by 2030.
June 11, 2026 The world a child is born into shapes the brain she carries for life A Washington University team analyzed brain scans from 11,878 children, age 9 and 10, weighing 649 features of their lives to see which left the deepest mark.
June 6, 2026 The Pope Weighs In on AI and What Makes Human Work Human In the first encyclical of his papacy, Pope Leo XIV published "Magnifica humanitas," arguing that AI is not intrinsically immoral but that its adoption needs to slow to build moral guardrails, establish social safety nets for displaced workers, and create democratic processes to keep technology development under public rather than oligarchic control.