Elites

Yaks graze in modern day Mongolia. Credit: Alicia Ventresca-Miller For the first time, researchers have pinpointed a date when elite Mongol Empire people were drinking yak milk, according to a study co-led by a University of Michigan researcher. By analyzing proteins found within ancient dental calculus, an international team of…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Urban inequality in Europe and the United States is so severe that urban elites claim most of the benefits from the agglomeration effects that big cities provide, while large parts of urban populations get little to nothing. In a study published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers at Linköping University show that the higher-than-expected outputs of larger cities critically depend on the extreme…

Exposure to elite misinformation is associated with the use of toxic language and moral outrage. Shown is the relationship between users’ misinformation-exposure scores and (a) the toxicity of the language used in their tweets, measured using the Google Jigsaw Perspective API, and (b) the extent to which their tweets involved expressions of moral outrage, measured using the algorithm from ref. 28. Extreme values are winsorized by 95% quantile for…

Archaeologists working on the Plaza of Columns Complex site at Teotihuacán have made a surprising discovery in the ancient Maya capital: the remains of a 1,700-year-old spider monkey, which the archaeologists suspect was once a state gift between elites.The Plaza of Columns sits between the Sun and Moon pyramids at Teotihuacán, the ancient seat of Mesoamerican power. As far as the urban planning of Teotihuacán goes, the plaza is prime real estate, and the objects found in the area are associated with Maya elites—perhaps…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain While social media platforms are the primary source of political information for a growing number of people, a majority of Twitter users do not follow either members of Congress, their president or news media, a new study suggests. They are much more likely to follow Tom Hanks or Katie Perry than an elected official.…

HONG KONG—China’s Communist Party will block promotions for senior cadres whose spouses or children hold significant assets abroad, people familiar with the matter said, as Beijing seeks to insulate its top officials from the types of sanctions now being directed at Russia.The ban, outlined in an internal notice by the party’s powerful Central Organization Department, could play a role in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s efforts to increase his influence at a twice-a-decade leadership shuffle scheduled for later this year.…