Culture

Nowadays, internet auctions play an important role in online trading. No matter whether you want to buy a hedge trimmer or an antique pocket watch - unlike purchases by a click at a fixed price, online auctions provide the atmosphere of a competition for the auction object. Whoever perceives the competition of real contenders, e.g. by avatars or photos on the screen, wishes to stay in the race - and increases his bid. This is a result of a KIT study with more than 450 test persons.

Now that so many teenagers have smartphones equipped with cameras it’s inevitable that they’re used to take pictures, sometimes regrettable pictures, and to share them with others. The problem is that this is not just often regrettable in their own eyes, but also illegal in the eyes of the law.

Evidence from the tropical lowlands of Central America reveals how Maya activity more than 2,000 years ago not only contributed to the decline of their environment but continues to influence today's environmental conditions, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.

Synthesizing old and new data, researchers were the first to show the full extent of the "Mayacene" as a microcosm of the early anthropocene -- a period when human activity began greatly affecting environmental conditions.

Cancer drug prices are rising rapidly, but no one wants innovation to slow down. Given those parameters, a new paper seeks a framework for establishing value based pricing for all new oncology drugs entering the marketplace.

"Gaydar" -- the purported ability to infer whether people are gay or straight based on their appearance -- seemed to get a scientific boost from a 2008 study that concluded people could accurately guess someone's sexual orientation based on photographs of their faces.

In a new paper published in the Journal of Sex Research, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison challenge what they call "the gaydar myth." William Cox, an assistant scientist in the Department of Psychology and the lead author, says gaydar isn't accurate and is actually a harmful form of stereotyping.

Daily marijuana use among the nation’s college students is on the rise, surpassing daily cigarette smoking for the first time in 2014.

Women living in poor areas in the UK are almost twice as likely to develop clinical anxiety as women in richer areas. However, whether men lived in poorer or richer areas made no difference to their levels of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). These are amongst the main findings of a major survey on how socio-economic factors affect mental health in the UK.

Smoking prevalence has stayed the same but the proportion with no intention of quitting has risen in the last seven years, according to results from the latest EUROASPIRE surveys presented for the first time today at ESC Congress 2015 by Professor Kornelia Kotseva, chair of the EUROASPIRE Steering Committee and senior clinical research fellow at Imperial College London, UK.

Since the 1980s, flagship comic-book superhero movie franchises – from DC’s Superman to Marvel’s Iron Man – have seen some major movie studio investments and, more often than not, blockbuster returns.

But significant changes in the superhero mythos in our culture indicate that their future seems bleak.

A group of intrepid Israeli researchers recently went back to the dawn of the Stone Age to make lunch.

Young people who identify with the goth subculture might be at increased risk of depression and self-harm, according to new research published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal.

The findings show that teenagers who identified very strongly with being a goth at age 15 were three times more likely to be clinically depressed and were five times more likely to self-harm at age 18 than young people who did not identify with the goth subculture.

Licensed tobacco retailers throughout New York City are selling a substantial number of cigarette packs carrying either counterfeit or out-of-state tax stamps, finds an investigation by NYU public health researchers.

These illegal cigarette sales are more pervasive in independent stores, as opposed to chain stores, according to the study published in the BMJ journal Tobacco Control.

The Reproducibility Project: Psychology, launched nearly four years ago, is one of the first crowdsourced research studies in the field. The researchers' most important finding was that, regardless of the analytic method or criteria used, fewer than half of their studies produced the same findings as the original study.

Frequent sexist wisecracks, comments and office cultures where women are ignored are just as damaging to women as single instances of sexual coercion and unwanted sexual attention, according to a new study out today in The Psychology of Women Quarterly (a SAGE Journal).

"If I offered you a bruised banana, you probably wouldn't be interested," said Jonathan Deutsch, PhD, director of Drexel University's Center for Hospitality and Sport Management. "But what if I offered you some banana ice cream on a hot summer day? I bet you'd find that a lot more appealing."