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.
Vosberg et al. have developed a continuous measure of biological sex in an adolescent cohort, based on quantitative traits of the brain and body. Within each sex, these ‘sex scores’ are associated with sex hormones and personality traits.
Gollwitzer et al. use smartphone mobility tracking to show that US county support for Trump in 2016 was associated with a lower reduction in mobility in March–May 2020, which in turn was associated with higher COVID-19 infection and fatality growth rates in pro-Trump counties.
An analysis of news shared on Twitter estimates the level of infodemic risk associated with COVID-19 across countries. Epidemic spread and infodemic risk co-evolve, with reliable information becoming more dominant as infection rates rise locally.
Efforts to eliminate anti-Black racism in academia must go far beyond superficial ticking of boxes. The academic community must create conditions for authentic, not tokenistic, Black engagement, argues Tony Reames.
The year 2020 has been marked by unprecedented cascading traumas, including the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession, race-driven social unrest and weather-related disasters. Mental health consequences of direct and media-based exposure to compounding stressors may be profound. Policymakers must act to ease the burden of trauma to protect public health.
In a Registered Report, Horne et al. report a sham-controlled, 5-day tDCS intervention paired with cognitive training, and found evidence against tDCS-induced training enhancement or transfer to untrained tasks.
Infants listened to lullabies and other songs recorded in cultures and languages that were unfamiliar to them. They relaxed more in response to the lullabies. This suggests that infants may be predisposed to respond to common features of lullabies.
In their study of Chinese consumers, Salvo et al. find that demand for food delivery—and the generation of plastic waste—rises when ambient air quality is poor.
From aardvark to zyzzyva, the world we live in is rich and complex. How is this diversity of objects represented in the human mind? Through an experimental and computational tour de force, Hebart et al. show that people share a mental representation of objects based on a small number of meaningful dimensions.
Perceptions of numerosity, duration and distance play fundamental roles in our behaviour and in our thinking, but how we perceive these abstract quantities is a mystery. Cheyette and Piantadosi provide a model that explains both new and long-standing experimental results on the accuracy and speed with which human subjects report the numerosity of a visible set.
Assaneo et al. show that speech production timing can facilitate perception. Individuals differed in whether they utilized motor timing depending on the auditory–motor cortex connection strength.
People donate billions each year, yet giving is often ineffective. Five experiments tested an explanation for inefficient giving based on evolutionary game theory, ruling out alternative accounts based on cognitive or emotional limitations.
Hebart et al. developed a computational model of similarity judgements for 1,854 natural objects. The model accurately predicted similarity and revealed 49 interpretable dimensions that reflect both perceptual and conceptual object properties.
Social and behavioural scientists have attempted to speak to the COVID-19 crisis. But is behavioural research on COVID-19 suitable for making policy decisions? We offer a taxonomy that lets our science advance in ‘evidence readiness levels’ to be suitable for policy. We caution practitioners to take extreme care translating our findings to applications.
Using a US state-level Bayesian susceptible, exposed, infectious, removed (SEIR) compartmental model, the authors demonstrate that, in almost all states, doubling rates of contact tracing and testing while also rolling back reopening by 25–50% via social distancing can mitigate the resurgence of COVID-19.
Combining standardized achievement data for 58 countries and 12,000 US school districts with detailed weather and academic calendar information, Park et al. show that the rate of learning decreases as the number of hot school days goes up.