An eye-catching new study shows just how different the experience of walking home at night is for women versus men.

The study, led by Brigham Young University public health professor Robbie Chaney, provides clear visual evidence of the constant environmental scanning women conduct as they walk in the dark, a safety consideration the study shows is unique to their experience.

"Magical" texts from Egypt in Coptic script and language are at the center of a research project at the University of Würzburg. They have now been collected and scientifically annotated for the first time in a 600-page book.

"These documents serve as an important source of information about popular religion—the reality, rather than the ideal, of religious practices and beliefs as they were lived and practiced in everyday life," explains Markéta Preininger Svobodova.

They thus provide today's readers with information about the experiences of people on the threshold of the transition from traditional Egyptian religion to Christianity and Islam, about their ideas of the human and divine world and about how human experiences such as happiness and success, suffering and illness, love and conflict were understood and negotiated. "These texts give us a direct insight into people's private lives at the time; they convey their true emotions," says the researcher.

Some gave $5; some gave $100. In the end, more than 100 people united over a single mission to save sacred Ojibwe birch bark scrolls from falling into a black hole of private collectors of Native artifacts.

A new study, which centers on evidence from skulls of a 6-million-year-old fossil ape, Lufengpithecus, offers important clues about the origins of bipedal locomotion courtesy of a novel method: analyzing its bony inner ear region using three-dimensional CT-scanning. The inner ear appears to provide a unique record of the evolutionary history of ape locomotion.

In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers have shown that orbitally induced strengthening of the Asian summer monsoon played a key role in the dispersal of Homo sapiens from Africa to East Asia during the last interglacial period 125,000 to 70,000 years ago.

Led by Prof. Ao Hong from the Institute of Earth Environment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the researchers integrated a comprehensive compilation of paleoanthropological site data with new high-resolution reconstructions of the Asian summer monsoon based on Chinese loess data, continuous modeling of the East Asian hydroclimate, and a novel human habitat simulation—all covering the past 280,000 years.

Survey the sex lives of Homo sapiens, and you’ll find couples, throuples, harems, and other arrangements of lovers. Fidelity, adultery, and ethically non-monogamous unions. How could one species have evolved myriad ways to mate? Concerning sex, what is natural for us humans?

The number of relatives that an individual has is expected to decrease by more than 35% in the near future. At the same time, the structure of families will change. The number of cousins, nieces, nephews and grandchildren will decline sharply, while the number of great-grandparents and grandparents will increase significantly. In 1950, a 65-year-old woman had an average of 41 living relatives. By 2095, a woman of the same age will have an average of only 25 living relatives.

Diego Alburez-Gutierrez is head of the Research Group Kinship Inequalities at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock. Together with Ivan Williams of the University of Buenos Aires and Hal Caswell of the University of Amsterdam, he recently published a study projecting the evolution of human kinship relationships worldwide.

The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.