Culture

Marrying multiple husbands at the same time, or polyandry, creates a safety net for women in some cultures, according to a recent study by a University of Missouri researcher. Extra husbands ensure that women's children are cared for even if their fathers die or disappear. Although polyandry is taboo and illegal in the United States, certain legal structures, such as child support payments and life insurance, fill the same role for American women that multiple husbands do in other cultures.

You're on the bus, and one of the only free seats is next to you. How, and why, do you stop another passenger sitting there? New research reveals the tactics commuters use to avoid each other, a practice the paper published in Symbolic Interaction describes as 'nonsocial transient behavior.'

Water's fate in China mirrors problems across the world: fouled, pushed far from its natural origins, squandered and exploited.

In this week's Science magazine, Jianguo "Jack" Liu, director of Michigan State University's Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, and doctoral student Wu Yang look at lessons learned in China and management strategies that hold solutions for China – and across the world.

SALINA, KAN. -- The type of relationship a woman has with her ex-partner is a factor in how the couple shares custody of children, according to a Kansas State University expert on postdivorce and co-parenting relationships.

Language use in books mirrors trends in gender equality over the generations in the US, according to a new study by psychologist Jean Twenge from San Diego State University, and colleagues. Their work explores how the language in the full text of more than one million books reflects cultural change in U.S. women's status. The study is published online in Sex Roles.

The biggest group lobbying against more government involvement in health care are not young people with no insurance, it's old people who already get government health care.

With more people in the system it will go from bad to worse, they believe. But the actual experiences of elderly on Medicare can be debunked or discredited, according to a paper published by a University of Illinois expert on retirement benefits.

Yes, retirement expert seems to be a real job.

According to theoretical physicists João da Cruz and Pedro Lind from Lisbon University, Portugal, imposing minimum capital levels for banks may not prevent the insolvency of a minority of banks from triggering a widespread banking system collapse. In a study recently published in EPJ B1, the researchers explain why this measure could instead lead to larger crises.

During the Neolithic Age (approximately 10000 BCE), early man evolved from hunter-gatherer to farmer and agriculturalist, living in larger, permanent settlements with a variety of domesticated animals and plant life. This transition brought about significant changes in terms of the economy, architecture, man's relationship to the environment, and more.

Advocates are scrambling to defend a health care reform plan everyone knows is flawed but one side staunchly defends - the same people throwing Food Stamp parties to get more people to sign up for those; it creates a dependent class of voters.

Depression was linked with an increased risk of peripheral artery disease (PAD) in a study of more than one thousand men and women with heart disease conducted by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco.

PAD is a circulatory problem in which narrowed arteries reduce blood flow to the limbs – usually the legs and feet – resulting in pain, reduced mobility and, in extreme cases, gangrene and amputation.

The study was published electronically on July 26, 2012, in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- A new University of Florida study shows the turkey, one of the most widely consumed birds worldwide, was domesticated more than 1,000 years earlier than previously believed.

Researchers say discovery of the bones from an ancient Mayan archaeological site in Guatemala provides evidence of domestication, usually a significant mark of civilization, and the earliest evidence of the Mexican turkey in the Maya world. The study appears online in PLoS ONE today.

A bonus payment to teachers can improve student academic performance — but only when it is given upfront, on the condition that part of the money must be returned if student performance fails to improve, research at the University of Chicago shows.

For more than 45 years, the poor in this country have been identified by the U.S. Census Bureau's Official Poverty Measure — a tool that determines America's poverty rate based on pretax money income, which does not reflect all the resources at a family's disposal - namely, the government services they only get because they are in the poverty range.

Increased stress in men is associated with a preference for heavier women, according to new surveys.

The work was led by psychologist Viren Swami of the University of Westminster in London and compared how stressed versus non-stressed men responded to pictures of female bodies varying from emaciated to obese. They found that the stressed group gave significantly higher ratings to the normal weight and overweight figures than the non-stressed group did, and that the stressed group generally had a broader range of figures they found attractive than the non-stressed group did.

Coping with climate change presents a number of challenges, but we may be able to get some hints from our ancestors. A study of tools from an archaeological site outside Jerusalem provides new information about land use patterns at the times of extreme climate change that may have helped the population adapt to their changing environment.