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The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), part of the Biden administration, recently announced a major new policy framework which will require all US federally funded research to be made freely available immediately upon publication, at the latest by January 2026. Dr Alondra Nelson, head of the OSTP, talks to Nature Human Behaviour about the background to and implications of this widely discussed decision.
Seersholm et al. analysed permafrozen middens from Inuit and Viking settlements to uncover evidence of diet in prehistoric Greenland. Using ancient DNA, they identified 42 different species and found that whales were surprisingly common.
This meta-analysis examines different features of infant-directed speech across languages and infant ages. The results suggest that there are cross-linguistic tendencies and that caregivers adjust the properties of infant-directed speech to suit infants’ changing needs.
Fan et al. show that trait somatic anxiety is associated with reduced tendency for exploration, including being less likely to choose an uncertain option.
Non-random mating affects the genetic makeup of populations and challenges the validity of popular genetics methods. A new study explores the unique patterns of non-random mating in the Japanese population and underscores the importance of large-scale genetic studies outside European-descended groups.
Klein-Flügge et al. examine connectivity of fine-grained amygdala nuclei and show that this can predict mental health dimensions, going beyond earlier studies that used relatively broad behavioural phenotypes and brain networks.
Yamamoto et al. find genetic evidence of assortative mating based on dietary habits and disease phenotypes in the Japanese population, and show that this pattern of partner choice is markedly different from its European-ancestry counterpart.
In an experiment with partisan Americans, the researchers found that social tipping was a potent but unreliable route to cultural change. Even a trivial activation of polarized identities undercut the socially beneficial tipping that otherwise occurred.
Rachel Hartman and colleagues review interventions designed to reduce partisan animosity in the United States and introduce a framework to categorize interventions across three levels: thoughts, relationships and institutions.
The low representation of academics with disabilities is a longstanding problem on which progress has been slow. Drawing on my research on disability-related barriers and my experiences of disability, I make six practical suggestions for how academic staff and people with disabilities can help make academia more disability inclusive.
Adults and children can represent the relative difficulty of discriminating two populations and recognize that larger samples are required for populations with greater overlap. This suggests that they have foundations for ‘intuitive power analyses’.
A citywide experiment tested the effects of three high-pay-off, geo-targeted lotteries to motivate adults to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Zip-code-targeted lotteries in which residents were given 50–100× boosts in their chances of a win did not result in higher vaccine uptake.
Drawing on her personal experience as an autistic scientist–practitioner, Eloise Stark explores how we can empower neurodivergent populations in academia.
University faculty members train future researchers and produce new knowledge. We show that US faculty members have a parent with a PhD roughly 25 times more often than the general population, with nearly double that rate at prestigious universities. The overrepresentation of socioeconomic privilege is likely to shape scholarship and diversity efforts.
Studying socioeconomic backgrounds and intergenerational transmission in the US academia, Morgan et al. find that faculty have a parent with a Ph.D. degree a striking 25 times more often than the general population.
Moving beyond the Gini coefficient in studying inequality, Blesch et al. identify two parameters that capture inequality concentrated at the top and bottom. The results challenge mixed associations between inequality and policy outcomes.
The authors use data-informed computational modelling and show that prioritizing vaccination efforts for the most disadvantaged communities can simultaneously improve equity and prevent the spread of disease.