Documents

Rise and fall of competitiveness in individualistic and collectivistic societies (Andreas Leibbrandt, Uri Gneezy, and John A. List)

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Competitiveness pervades life: plants compete for sunlight and water, animals for territory and food, and humans for mates and income. Herein we investigate human competitiveness with a natural experiment and a set of behavioral experiments. We compare competitiveness in traditional fishing societies where local natural forces determine whether fishermen work in isolation or in collectives. …

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Political ideology affects energy-efficiency attitudes and choices (Dena M. Gromet, Howard Kunreuther, and Richard P. Larrick)

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This research demonstrates how promoting the environment can negatively affect adoption of energy efficiency in the United States because of the political polarization surrounding environmental issues. Study 1 demonstrated that more politically conservative individuals were less in favor of investment in energy-efficient technology than were those who were more politically liberal. This finding was driven …

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Interplay of physics and evolution in the likely origin of protein biochemical function (Jeffrey Skolnick and Mu Gao)

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The intrinsic ability of protein structures to exhibit the geometric and sequence properties required for ligand binding without evolutionary selection is shown by the coincidence of the properties of pockets in native, single domain proteins with those in computationally generated, compact homopolypeptide, artificial (ART) structures. The library of native pockets is covered by a remarkably …

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Early Human Diets

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The old saying “You are what you eat” takes on new significance in the most comprehensive analysis to date of early human teeth from Africa. Prior to about 3.5 million years ago, early humans dined almost exclusively on leaves and fruits from trees, shrubs, and herbs—similar to modern-day gorillas and chimpanzees.   However, about 3.5 million …

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TN GOP House Speaker threatens to expel Democrats over gun violence protest (David Badash)

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The Republican Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, Cameron Sexton, on Monday stripped two Democratic state lawmakers from all their committees and subcommittees in retribution for their support of massive protests by thousands of Tennessee citizens at the state Capitol last week, after the Nashville elementary school mass shooting. He may move to expel …

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Blundering on the Brink

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The Secret History and Unlearned Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Sergey Radchenko and Vladislav Zubok) There aren’t enough palm trees, the Soviet general thought to himself. It was July 1962, and Igor Statsenko, the 43-year-old Ukrainian-born commander of the Red Army’s missile division, found himself inside a helicopter, flying over central and western Cuba. …

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