Research Briefing in 2023

Using a large dataset of individuals from Early Neolithic Europe, we analysed DNA, diet and pathology to determine which factors most affected skeletal height. We found that the male–female height differences in north-central Europe were exceptionally large, and that the short stature of female individuals in this region possibly reflects a cultural preference to support male individuals. By contrast, in the Mediterranean, it is male individuals who were short, probably as a consequence of environmental stress.

As screen time becomes more and more present in the lives of children, parents need the best information to help to guide their decisions. By collating all of the meta-analytic evidence from across the field, we hope to provide that evidence.

Trends in interpersonal violence have been reconstructed using data on violence-related injuries from more than 3,500 excavated skeletons from the ancient Middle East. Documenting variations in the patterns of violence in this key historical setting broadens perspectives on the long history of conflict.

We identified two components of honesty — ‘belief speaking’ and ‘fact speaking’ — in public-facing communication by US politicians. For Republicans, belief speaking is strongly associated with the sharing of untrustworthy information. Fact speaking is associated with the sharing of more reliable information, irrespective of party affiliation.

We proposed a confidence metric and analysed data from five large surveys that spanned 30 years in Europe and the USA. We found that both overconfidence and negative attitudes towards science peak at intermediate knowledge levels.

We trained an artificial intelligence (AI) system to recommend different interactions and connections between humans playing a group game together. Through trial and error, the AI system learned to take an encouraging approach to uncooperative individuals, keeping them engaged with the group and boosting cooperation levels for everyone.

Zero-COVID-19 strategies used hard lockdown to save human lives. Our study used modern policy evaluation tools and high-quality longitudinal, nationally representative data and found that the lives saved during Melbourne’s hard 111-day lockdown came at a high cost to parents of young dependent children, and in particular mothers, as the lockdown continued.

Climate change and rising temperatures are expected to increase food insecurity globally. An analysis of 150 countries shows that heat increases food insecurity within days of exposure. Mediation analyses indicate this may be linked to heat-related effects on the capability to earn income and afford food. Low-income areas and areas with prevalent agricultural or vulnerable employment are most affected.

Despite widespread concerns that social media exacerbate incivility and partisan polarization, few solutions to address this issue have been identified. We developed a mobile chat platform to study how varying levels of anonymity shape conversations about politics. In contrast to the popular wisdom, we find that carefully structured anonymous online conversations can reduce polarization.

Analogical reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, as it enables us to flexibly solve new problems without extensive practice. By using a wide range of tests, we demonstrate that GPT-3, a large-scale artificial intelligence language model, is capable of solving difficult analogy problems at a level comparable to human performance.

A healthy lifestyle is associated with longer total life expectancy and a larger proportion of remaining years lived without a major noncommunicable disease in the Chinese population. Public health initiatives that promote healthy lifestyles may have a role in realizing the Healthy China 2030 strategic plan.

A study of 30,000 parents across 6 international cohorts reveals that parental genes are linked with the investments that parents make in their offspring, from adopting more healthy behaviours during pregnancy to leaving wealth to adult children. The findings suggest that parental alleles that are not transmitted can affect children through influencing the environments that parents create for their children over the course of their lives.

Responses to survey questionnaires are a vital component of nearly all social and behavioural research. This study examined item nonresponse behaviour across 109 questionnaire items from 360,628 individuals in the UK Biobank using phenotypic and genetic data. These results were used to build an improved understanding of how item nonresponse might lead to bias in genetic studies in general.

The spatiotemporal dynamics of the brain have an essential role in how we perceive, decide and behave. Interacting spiral waves are now seen, from functional magnetic resonance imaging brain recordings, to serve as a mechanism for organizing spatiotemporal activity across the whole cortex. Further, these waves enable flexible reconfiguration of task-driven brain activity.

Refugee adolescents in German schools have fewer friends and are more often rejected than their classmates. However, refugees are less rejected in more diverse classrooms because, first, other ethnic minority peers are more accepting of refugees and, second, majority-group peers build more positive relationships with refugees in more diverse settings.

Semantic representations enable humans to identify stimuli. We illustrate that the organization of semantic representations is in part shaped by psychological needs: people who are averse to uncertainty have more-differentiated and separable semantic representations than individuals who are tolerant of uncertainty, and this separation predicts improved discrimination but poorer generalization.

One of the reasons that people perform poorly when trying to detect deception is the difficulty of integrating multiple cues into a binary judgement. A simple heuristic of only judging the level of detail in the message consistently allowed people to discriminate lies from truths.

Polygenic indices (PGIs) are increasingly advocated as screening tools for personalized medicine and education. We find, however, that rankings of individuals in PGI distributions for cardiovascular disease and education created with different construction methods and discovery samples are highly unstable. Hence, current PGIs lack the desired precision to be used routinely for personalized intervention.

With the world expansion of education, mothers have an increasingly important role in shaping the educational status of their children, particularly for daughters and in contexts with a high prevalence of mothers who are paired with a less-educated father.

Human language processing is poorly matched by artificial intelligence algorithms. We analysed fMRI brain recordings of 304 participants while they listened to short stories and compared brain activations to artificial intelligence algorithms. Unlike such algorithms, we found that the human brain operates with a hierarchy of predictions that anticipate incoming words and phrases.