Science news from Phys.org - first up Social Sciences...then there is more

The overall organization and effects on the well-being of different kinds of social relationships has been widely investigated. 

• However, how people conceptualize them (i.e., mentally make sense of different types of bonds) is not yet fully understood.

March 30, 2025 feature

How humans across cultures and historical periods conceptualize relationships

by Ingrid Fadelli , Phys.org 

Credit: Yin Wang.

Throughout the course of their lives, humans are known to establish and navigate an intricate web of social relationships, ranging from friendships to family bonds, romances, acquaintances, professional relationships and, today, online interactions. Over the past decades, some behavioral scientists have been trying to better understand how people make sense of these different types of relationships.

 

Researchers at Beijing Normal University carried out a study aimed at better understanding how humans across time and from different cultural backgrounds make sense of their relationships.

Their paper, published in Nature Human Behavior, offers new interesting insights into human relationships, which were gathered using a combination of online surveys, laboratory experiments and computational tools.

"We collected online survey data from 19 regions worldwide, collected in-person interview data from the matrilineal society Mosuo tribe in China, and retrieved data from literature of different historical timepoints," Yin Wang, senior author of the paper, told Phys.org.

"We then used dimension reduction and clustering methods on these data to find the basic organization of human relationships."

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Animation summarizing the FAVEE-HPP model. Credit: Yin Wang.

Wang and his colleagues gathered responses to an online survey from people living in 19 regions across five continents and summarized the results of laboratory experiments, ultimately analyzing information about the relationships between 20,427 people worldwide using computational models.

Notably, they also analyzed documents containing information about the relationships of people during different historical periods, spanning across 3,000 years.

 You are invited to continue reading  https://phys.org/news/2025-03-humans-cultures-historical-periods-relationships.html

 

Psychology & Psychiatry 

Short-term reactivation of brain between encoding of memories enhances recall, study finds

Past neuroscience and psychology studies have shown that after the human brain encodes specific events or information, it can periodically reactivate them to facilitate their retention, ...

TAKE-AWAY >

Overall, the initial findings gathered by this team of researchers suggest that the brain also re-activates stimuli that we are trying to remember over short periods of time while we are awake. Further research could help to better understand the brain re-activation processes they observed and determine how they differ from those associated with memory consolidation during sleep or rest.

In the future, these results could also help devise interventions aimed at improving people's ability to remember information in the short-term, which could be beneficial for both students and people diagnosed with memory disorders. Dr. Halpern has now left the Kahana Lab and now works in another research lab that is exploring the connections between memory and decision-making.

1. "I am very interested in the way in which rehearsal and reinstatement might be involved in the evaluation process that leads us to make a choice," added Dr. Halpern.  
2. "Another question I am quite interested in exploring is, if we are routinely (perhaps subconsciously) rehearsing our past experiences, how does our brain keep these separate from our ongoing veridical perceptual experience?

"In theory, this should cause some interference in terms of remembering the order in which things happened, but this doesn't seem to be the case, even in our data."

You are encouraged to read the entire study > https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-03-short-term-reactivation-brain-encoding.html

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Saturday Citations: When the universe was young and cute. Plus: Southern Ocean cooling trend explained 

by Chris Packham ,

". . .A multi-institutional group of researchers now reports generating "demonstrated certified randomness" using a 56-qubit quantum computer. 

• A study in Frontiers in Marine Science reports evidence of deep ecosystem consequences following the disappearance of great white sharks from False Bay, South Africa. 
• And in actually great medical news, a team at McMaster University discovered a new class of antibiotics.. . .

 

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Baby universe, part 2

Using the power of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, an international research team spent four years producing the most precise image of the universe in its infancy, an image of the cosmic microwave background 12.9 billion years ago. 

• The new measurements provide a refined estimate of the age of the universe, about 13.8 billion years old, with high certainty.

Additionally, the measurement reconfirms one of the two conflicting measurements physicists call the Hubble tension. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background have consistently yielded a universal expansion rate of 67 to 68 kilometers per second per megaparsec; measurements derived from the motion of nearby galaxies indicate an expansion rate of 73 to 74 km/s/Mpc. The new observation confirms the lower rate yet again.

Professor Erminia Calabrese, director of research at Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy, says, 

"We've been able to measure more precisely than ever before that the observable universe extends almost 50 billion light years in all directions from us, and contains as much mass as 1,900 'zetta-suns', or almost 2 trillion trillion suns."