Les #micro-plastiques attirent les oiseaux marins, qui les prennent pour des proies vivantes, révèle une étude publiée le 9 novembre dans la revue Science.
Marine plastic debris emits a keystone infochemical for olfactory foraging seabirds | Science Advances
▻http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/11/e1600395
#pollution
Actualidad | Universidad de Zaragoza
▻https://www.unizar.es/noticias/existen-cuatro-tipos-basicos-de-personalidad-pesimista-optimista-envidiosa-y-
Un estudio sobre el comportamiento humano revela que el 90% de la población se puede clasificar en cuatro tipos básicos de personalidad: optimista, pesimista, confiado y envidioso. Sin embargo, este último patrón, el de envidioso, es el más numeroso, con un 30% frente al 20% de cada uno de los grupos restantes.
Esa es una de las principales conclusiones de un trabajo publicado recientemente en la revista Science Advances por investigadores de las Universidades de Zaragoza, Carlos III de Madrid, Rovira i Virgili y de Barcelona. El estudio analizó el comportamiento de 541 voluntarios ante un centenar de dilemas sociales, con opciones de colaborar o de entrar en conflicto con los demás, en función de intereses individuales o colectivos.
“Los resultados obtenidos van en contra de ciertas teorías como la que apunta que los humanos actúan de manera puramente racional y, por lo tanto, deberán tenerse en cuenta a la hora de rediseñar políticas económicas, sociales y de cooperación”. Así lo indica Yamir Moreno, coordinador del Grupo de Redes y Sistemas Complejos (Cosnet) del Instituto de Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos (BIFI) de la Universidad de Zaragoza y presidente de la Sociedad de Sistemas Complejos, para quien “este tipo de estudios son importantes porque mejoran las teorías existentes sobre comportamiento humano, pues las dotan de una base experimental”.
Le résumé de l’étude (l’article est accessible en ligne)
Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games | Science Advances
▻http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451
Abstract
Socially relevant situations that involve strategic interactions are widespread among animals and humans alike. To study these situations, theoretical and experimental research has adopted a game theoretical perspective, generating valuable insights about human behavior. However, most of the results reported so far have been obtained from a population perspective and considered one specific conflicting situation at a time. This makes it difficult to extract conclusions about the consistency of individuals’ behavior when facing different situations and to define a comprehensive classification of the strategies underlying the observed behaviors. We present the results of a lab-in-the-field experiment in which subjects face four different dyadic games, with the aim of establishing general behavioral rules dictating individuals’ actions. By analyzing our data with an unsupervised clustering algorithm, we find that all the subjects conform, with a large degree of consistency, to a limited number of behavioral phenotypes (envious, optimist, pessimist, and trustful), with only a small fraction of undefined subjects. We also discuss the possible connections to existing interpretations based on a priori theoretical approaches. Our findings provide a relevant contribution to the experimental and theoretical efforts toward the identification of basic behavioral phenotypes in a wider set of contexts without aprioristic assumptions regarding the rules or strategies behind actions. From this perspective, our work contributes to a fact-based approach to the study of human behavior in strategic situations, which could be applied to simulating societies, policy-making scenario building, and even a variety of business applications.
Pour les non hispanisants
Four basic personality types identified : Pessimistic ; optimistic ; envious and trusting — ScienceDaily
▻https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160915085719.htm
Are you basically envious? A computer algorith organized 90% of people into four groups: the largest group, accounting for 30%, being the Envious — those who don’t actually mind what they achieve, as long as they’re better than everyone else; next are the Optimists — who believe that they and their partner will make the best choice for both of them — on 20%. Also on 20% are the Pessimists — who select the option which they see as the lesser of two evils — and the Trusting group — who are born collaborators and who will always cooperate and who don’t really mind if they win or lose.
Florida sinkhole archeological site recasts ’peopling of the Americas’ narrative - CSMonitor.com
▻http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0513/Florida-sinkhole-archeological-site-recasts-peopling-of-the-Americas-narr
Deep in an underwater sinkhole in a river in Florida, archeologists have found the remains of a prehistoric population of humans that lived in the region some 14,550 years ago. Stone tools, mastodon bones with distinct cut marks, and mastodon dung hold enticing clues into the lives of these early Americans and the megafauna around them. Those new findings are reported in a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances.
Today these findings are accepted as adding to the early prehistory of the Americas, but that wasn’t the case for artifacts unearthed from the same site just decades ago.
Pre-Clovis occupation 14,550 years ago at the Page-Ladson site, Florida, and the peopling of the Americas | Science Advances
▻http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/5/e1600375
Abstract
Stone tools and mastodon bones occur in an undisturbed geological context at the Page-Ladson site, Florida. Seventy-one radiocarbon ages show that ~14,550 calendar years ago (cal yr B.P.), people butchered or scavenged a mastodon next to a pond in a bedrock sinkhole within the Aucilla River. This occupation surface was buried by ~4 m of sediment during the late Pleistocene marine transgression, which also left the site submerged. Sporormiella and other proxy evidence from the sediments indicate that hunter-gatherers along the Gulf Coastal Plain coexisted with and utilized megafauna for ~2000 years before these animals became extinct at ~12,600 cal yr B.P. Page-Ladson expands our understanding of the earliest colonizers of the Americas and human-megafauna interaction before extinction.
