Recent Science News

Strangers who waited without phones paid back 116% in a trust game, versus 91% with phones
In a lab experiment with 240 students, those who waited 20 minutes with strangers without their phones returned 116% of what partners sent in a trust game, against 91% for those with phone access, and 82.5% versus 62.5% chatted with someone.

Leprosy was infecting people in the Americas about 1,000 years before Europeans arrived
Ancient DNA from three Indigenous Ancestors in Canada and Argentina, dated to roughly 860 to 1,310 years ago, carried Mycobacterium lepromatosis, showing this second leprosy bacterium circulated across the Americas long before European contact.

Restaurants that lose a Michelin star get better TripAdvisor reviews
Tracking Michelin-listed restaurants in Great Britain and Ireland from 2010 to 2020, researchers found that losing stars raised average TripAdvisor ratings by about 0.31 points, while gaining stars changed nothing, apparently because diners expect less.

The youngest kids in class are more likely to see themselves as too thin
Using school entry cutoffs across European countries, economists found that students who are young for their class more often describe their normal-weight bodies as too thin, want to gain weight, eat more calorie-dense food and exercise less.

In six countries, right-wingers rate the 1950 to 2000 era more kindly than the left does
Surveys of 3,000 people in the US, UK, Italy, Poland, Mexico and South Africa found right-leaning respondents rated society from 1950 to 2000 more positively in every country. Experiments suggest ideology shapes the view of the past, not the reverse.

PGA Tour golfers score 0.2 strokes better per round with politically like-minded partners
Using random group assignments on the PGA Tour, researchers found golfers scored 0.2 strokes better per round in politically homogeneous groups, worth five ranks before the cut and $13,000 to $23,400 in earnings. The gap widened when polarization was high.

Paracetamol reaches the womb at levels that slowed early embryo growth in lab tests
One hour after a standard 1 g dose, paracetamol averaged 124.5 µM in women's uterine fluid. At 100 to 200 µM it blocked DNA synthesis, cut cell numbers in human and mouse embryos, and at 200 µM killed some early embryos outright.