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🧬 **Genetic history of Scythia**

"_Using high-quality genomic data generated from 131 ancient individuals from Great Scythia and neighboring regions of the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, we established the genetic structure of the Scythians, revealing their diverse origin with major European Bronze Age ancestral components, and genetic traces of migration and invasions._"

Tatiana V. Andreeva et al., Genetic history of Scythia. Sci. Adv.11, eads8179 (2025). DOI: doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ads8179.

@science

🖥️ **Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI**

"_Through four experiments with over 4,400 participants, we reveal a social penalty for AI use: Individuals who use AI tools face negative judgments about their competence and motivation from others._"

J.A. Reif, R.P. Larrick, & J.B. Soll, Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (19) e2426766122, doi.org/10.1073/pnas.242676612 (2025).

@psychology

**Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers**

"_Results indicate that students with stronger verbal abilities, and who are more curious, open-minded, and intellectually rigorous, are more likely to study philosophy. Nonetheless, after accounting for such baseline differences, philosophy majors outperform all other majors on tests of verbal and logical reasoning and on a measure of valuable habits of mind._"

PRINZING, M. and VAZQUEZ, M. (2025) ‘Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers’, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, pp. 1–19. doi: doi.org/10.1017/apa.2025.10007.

@philosophy

**Dark personality traits are associated with academic misconduct, frustration, negative thinking, and generative AI use habits: the case of Sichuan art universities**

"_Results showed that dark personality traits were significantly associated with academic dishonesty, anxiety, and procrastination, and that these markers of academic misbehavior were linked to increased frustration, negative thinking, and generative AI use._"

Song, J., Liu, S. Dark personality traits are associated with academic misconduct, frustration, negative thinking, and generative AI use habits: the case of Sichuan art universities. BMC Psychol 13, 633 (2025). doi.org/10.1186/s40359-025-029.

@psychology

🇧🇷 🇵🇹 **The Cross of Gold: Brazilian Treasure and the Decline of Portugal**

"_In this paper, we show that the discovery of massive quantities of gold in Brazil over the eighteenth century played a key role in the long-run development of Portugal. The country suffered from an economic and political resource curse. A counterfactual based on synthetic control methods suggests that by 1800 Portugal’s GDP per capita was 40 percent lower than it would have been without its endowment of Brazilian gold._"

Kedrosky, D. and Palma, N. (2025) ‘The Cross of Gold: Brazilian Treasure and the Decline of Portugal’, The Journal of Economic History, pp. 1–37. doi: doi.org/10.1017/S0022050725100.

@histodons

**Further insights into maternal and paternal human histories in southern Iberia**

"_Genetic ancestry among Andalusians seems to be constituted by three foremost continental origins: European, African and Middle Eastern. The examined male group has revealed a noticeable proportion of individuals (over 45%) with a non-correspondence between maternal and paternal haplogroup origins, a signal of different population demographic histories linked to both sexes in the past._"

González-Barrio, M. et al. (2025) ‘Further insights into maternal and paternal human histories in southern Iberia’, Evolutionary Human Sciences, pp. 1–28. doi: doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2025.10006.

**Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary**

"_We study vocabulary changes in more than 15 million biomedical abstracts from 2010 to 2024 indexed by PubMed and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. This excess word analysis suggests that at least 13.5% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs._"

Dmitry Kobak et al., Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary. Sci. Adv.11, eadt3813 (2025). DOI: doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adt3813.

**Thinking outside the box means thinking outside the search engine**

"_Nominal group analysis reveals that while individual creativity may be enhanced by internet access, groups articulate fewer novel solutions when provided internet access, suggesting that internet access may constrain collective creative fluency._"

Oppenheimer, D.M., Patterson, M.T. Thinking outside the box means thinking outside the search engine. Mem Cogn (2025). doi.org/10.3758/s13421-025-017.

**Literary Texts From The Sippar Library V: A Hymn In Praise Of Babylon And The Babylonians**

"_The article presents a previously unknown hymn in praise of Marduk, the Esagil, Babylon and the Babylonians. It contains unparalleled descriptions of the healing powers of Marduk, the splendor of Babylon, the spring borne by the Euphrates to the city’s fields and the generosity of the Babylonians themselves._"

Fadhil, A.A. and Jiménez, E. (2025) ‘LITERARY TEXTS FROM THE SIPPAR LIBRARY V: A HYMN IN PRAISE OF BABYLON AND THE BABYLONIANS’, Iraq, pp. 1–58. doi: doi.org/10.1017/irq.2024.23.

@archaeodons

**Leonardo's Vitruvian Man: modern craniofacial anatomical analysis reveals a possible solution to the 500-year-old mystery**

"_This paper demonstrates that Leonardo’s explicit textual reference to ‘an equilateral triangle’ between the figure’s legs provides his construction method and reveals the anatomical foundation for his proportional choices._"

Sweeney, R. M. (2025) ‘Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man: modern craniofacial anatomical analysis reveals a possible solution to the 500-year-old mystery’, Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, pp. 1–13. doi: doi.org/10.1080/17513472.2025..

🖥️ 🧠 **Causal effects of physical activity and screen time on childhood intelligence via Mendelian randomization: The mediating role of intracranial volume**

“_Our two-sample MR analysis revealed a positive causal effect of moderate to vigorous physical activity (PA) on childhood IQ (β = 0.42, 95 % confidence interval (CI): [0.12, 0.72], p = 6.26 × 10−3), whereas leisure screen time (LST) exhibited a negative causal effect (β = −0.35, 95 % CI: [ −0.60, −0.10], p = 5.59 ×10−3). Reverse MR analysis found no evidence of causations._”

Feng, J., Wan, Y., & Zhang, L. (2025). Causal effects of physical activity and screen time on childhood intelligence via Mendelian randomization: The mediating role of intracranial volume. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 74, 101586. doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2025.101.

@psychology

**Unveiling the origins and genetic makeup of the “forgotten people”: A study of the Sarmatian-period population in the Carpathian Basin**

“_Our findings reveal minor East Asian ancestry in the Carpathian Basin (CB) Sarmatians, distinguishing them from other regional populations. Using F4 statistics, qpAdm, and identity-by-descent (IBD) analysis, we show that CB Sarmatians descended from Steppe Sarmatians originating in the Ural and Kazakhstan regions, with Romanian Sarmatians serving as a possible genetic bridge between the two groups._”

Schütz, Oszkár et al., (2025). Unveiling the origins and genetic makeup of the “forgotten people”: A study of the Sarmatian-period population in the Carpathian Basin. Cell. doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.05.

@science

🇮🇳 🇨🇳 **The Demographic Race between India and China**

"_Using multi-dimensional demographic projections by age, sex, education, and labor force participation, we show that China’s current apparent demographic travails will not necessarily threaten its leading status relative to India for most of the next half century given India’s disadvantage in educational attainment and very low female labor force participation._"

Marois, G., Gietel-Basten, S. & Lutz, W. The Demographic Race between India and China. Popul Res Policy Rev 44, 44 (2025). doi.org/10.1007/s11113-025-099.

**Linguistic Evidence Suggests that Xiōng-nú and Huns Spoke the Same Paleo-Siberian Language**

"_Here, we show that linguistic evidence from four independent domains does indeed suggest that the Xiōng-nú and the Huns spoke the same Paleo-Siberian language and that this was an early form of Arin, a member of the Yeniseian language family._"

Bonmann, S. and Fries, S. (2025), Linguistic Evidence Suggests that Xiōng-nú and Huns Spoke the Same Paleo-Siberian Language. Trans Philologic Soc. doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.1232.

@linguistics

🌍 🌡️ **Global warming may increase the burden of obstructive sleep apnea**

"_High ambient temperatures (99th vs. 25th; 27.3 vs. 6.4 °C) are associated with a ~ 45% increase in the probability of having OSA on a given night, globally. The increase in OSA prevalence in 2023 due to global warming was associated with a loss of 788,198 (489,226 to 1,087,170) healthy life years, and a productivity loss of ~105 million days from impaired workplace attendance in the 29 studied countries._"

Lechat, B., Manners, J., Pinilla, L. et al. Global warming may increase the burden of obstructive sleep apnea. Nat Commun 16, 5100 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-602.

@climatechange

**Large language models without grounding recover non-sensorimotor but not sensorimotor features of human concepts**

“_We found that learning constrained to the language domain captures human-level conceptual representation in non-sensorimotor dimensions such as valence and emotional arousal but yields impoverished representation of sensorimotor knowledge._”

Xu, Q., Peng, Y., Nastase, S.A. et al. Large language models without grounding recover non-sensorimotor but not sensorimotor features of human concepts. Nat Hum Behav (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-022.

@ai @psychology

**South Arabia’s prehistoric monument landscape shows social resilience to climate change**

“_By decentering analysis from a single era or type of monument, we show how monument classes are proxies for social behavior of mobile, persistent pastoralists. Our model highlights a reliance on monuments as touchstones of social belonging and as flexible technologies of social resilience in a changing world._”

McCorriston J, Ball L, Harrower MJ, Hamilton IM, Ivory SJ, et al. (2025) South Arabia’s prehistoric monument landscape shows social resilience to climate change. PLOS ONE 20(5): e0323544. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0.

@anthropology @archaeodons

**Was Fichte a Proto-Fascist?**

“_Fichte was not a proto-fascist, though certain aspects of his writing and his style had a strong appeal to fascists._”

Phillips, R. L. (2025) ‘Was Fichte a Proto-Fascist?’, The European Legacy, pp. 1–20. doi: doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2025..

@philosophy

**Adverse reactions to the use of large language models in social interactions**

“_Here, we report the results of a large-scale, preregistered online experiment (n= 3,552⁠⁠) showing that human players’ fairness, trust, trustworthiness, cooperation, and coordination in economic two-player games decrease when the decision of the interaction partner is taken over by ChatGPT. On the contrary, we observe no adverse reactions when individuals are uncertain whether they are interacting with a human or a LLM._”

Fabian Dvorak, Regina Stumpf, Sebastian Fehrler, Urs Fischbacher, Adverse reactions to the use of large language models in social interactions, PNAS Nexus, Volume 4, Issue 4, April 2025, pgaf112, doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf.

@ai @economics

**Medieval genomes from eastern Iberia illuminate the role of Morisco mass deportations in dismantling a long-standing genetic bridge with North Africa**

“_For the first time, we also demonstrate the persistence of North African ancestry in a Christian cemetery until the seventeenth century, in addition to evidence of slave trafficking from North Africa._”

Oteo-Garcia, G., Silva, M., Foody, M.G.B. et al. Medieval genomes from eastern Iberia illuminate the role of Morisco mass deportations in dismantling a long-standing genetic bridge with North Africa. Genome Biol 26, 108 (2025). doi.org/10.1186/s13059-025-035.

@science @archaeodons

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