Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
In this issue, two articles that focus on two very different contexts — gun violence in US schools and the death toll in the Syrian conflict — highlight the complexities involved in quantifying and interpreting patterns of violence.
Education reform in the United States has stalled and persistent achievement gaps remain. The challenges of overcoming socioeconomic disadvantages cannot be ignored if we are to develop an education system that will prepare all students to be productive members of the twenty-first century.
Business ethics research is not currently a cumulative science, but it must become one. The benefits to humanity from research that helps firms improve their ethics could be enormous, especially if that research also shows that strong ethics improves the effectiveness of companies.
Clinically useful tools to identify the aberrant neural circuitry in individuals with psychiatric illness are lacking, as are treatments that do more than just address symptoms. Neuroplasticity-based treatments and computational neuroscience may hold some of the keys to unlocking the golden age of psychiatry.
The way in which data on conflict violence is collected can not only lead to severe underestimation of the human toll of conflict, but also to misinterpretation of trends in conflict violence, says Megan Price.
A study now finds that visual perceptual learning of complex features occurs due to enhancement of later, decision-related stages of visual processing, rather than earlier, visual encoding stages. It is suggested that strengthening of the readout of sensory information between stages may be reinforced by an implicit reward learning mechanism.
McAuliffe et al. synthesize recent behavioural and neuroscientific evidence on the development of fairness behaviours in children, which shows that the signatures of human fairness can be traced in childhood.
Using ultra-high-field functional magnetic resonance imaging, the authors identify six widely separated maps in the human cortex that code for numerosity (the number of objects in a set).
Perceptual sensitivity in humans is shown to improve after training on a perceptual learning task owing to faster post-perceptual (late) decision-processing rather than faster sensory (early) processing.
Over six experiments, Kanakogi et al. show that infants as young as 6 months support third-party interventions that protect victims from aggressors. This suggests that human emphasis upon such acts is rooted within the preverbal infant’s mind.
Pah et al. analyse gun violence incidents at US schools for the period 1990–2013 and find heightened rates in the period 2007–2013. Indicators of economic distress significantly correlate with increases in the rate of gun violence.
By developing wireless sensors to track social interactions among hunter-gatherers in the Republic of the Congo and the Philippines, Migliano et al. find that a few strong friendship ties connecting unrelated families lead to more efficient social networks.
