Friday, April 4, 2025
How humans across cultures and historical periods conceptualize relationships
Credit:
Yin Wang.
Throughout
the course of their lives, humans are known to establish and navigate an
intricate web of social relationships, ranging from friendships to family
bonds, romances, acquaintances, professional relationships and, today, online
interactions. Over the past decades, some behavioral scientists have been
trying to better understand how people make sense of these different types of
relationships.
The overall organization and effects on
the well-being of different kinds of social relationships has been widely
investigated. However, how people conceptualize them (i.e., mentally make sense
of different types of bonds) is not yet fully understood.
Researchers at Beijing Normal University
carried out a study aimed at better understanding how humans across time and
from different cultural backgrounds make sense of their relationships.
Their paper, published in Nature
Human Behavior, offers new interesting insights into human relationships,
which were gathered using a combination of online surveys, laboratory
experiments and computational tools.
"We collected online survey data
from 19 regions worldwide, collected in-person interview data from the
matrilineal society Mosuo tribe in China, and retrieved data from literature of
different historical timepoints," Yin Wang, senior author of the paper,
told Phys.org.
"We then used dimension reduction and clustering methods on these data to find the basic organization of human relationships."
Animation summarizing the FAVEE-HPP model.
Credit: Yin Wang.
Wang and his colleagues gathered
responses to an online survey from people living in 19 regions across five
continents and summarized the results of laboratory experiments, ultimately
analyzing information about the relationships between 20,427 people worldwide
using computational models.
Notably, they also analyzed
documents containing information about the relationships of people during
different historical periods, spanning across 3,000 years.
Building on the results of their
analyses, the researchers created a framework that outlines the universal
structure of relationships across cultures and historical periods. This
framework was dubbed the FAVEE (Formality, Activeness, Valence, Exchange, Equality)-
HPP (hostile, private and public) model.
"Our study reveals this
fundamental framework called the FAVEE-HPP model," explained Wang.
"It shows that humans use the
five dimensions, which are formality, activeness, valence, exchange, and
equality, and the three categories, which are hostile, private, and public, to
represent their social relationships. We've also proven that this framework is
consensual across different cultures, societies, and historical
timepoints."
Perhaps the most interesting achievement of the recent study by Wang and his colleagues is that it provides a computational framework that can be used to represent human relationships in a quantifiable and organized way.
Credit: Cheng et al. (Nature Human Behaviour, 2025).
A
five-dimensional model of human relationships (FAVEE model). Credit: Nature Human Behaviour (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-025-02122-8
This
model could soon be used to study the links between different dimensions of
relationships and real-world phenomena, such as divorce, perceived social
supports, well-being and even life expectancy.
"In future follow-up studies, we
are interested in exploring how relationship representations are constructed
during human development and how we form idiosyncratic impressions on
relationships," added Wang. "In addition, we plan to probe individual
differences and context differences in representing relationships."
Wang and his colleagues published the
data they collected on GitHub, thus it
could soon also be used by other research groups to further explore the complex
underpinnings of human relationships.
In the future, they hope that the new universal model of relationships outlined in their paper will contribute to the understanding of human social networks and the patterns shaping their evolution across generations or in different geographical regions.
by Ingrid Fadelli , Phys.org
Source: How humans across cultures and historical periods conceptualize relationships
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.webp)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
Thursday, April 3, 2025
Discovery Alert: Four Little Planets, One Big Step - UNIVERSE
This artist’s concept pictures the planets orbiting
Barnard’s Star, as seen from close to the surface of one of them.
Image credit: International Gemini
Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld
The Discovery
Four rocky planets much smaller
than Earth orbit Barnard’s Star, the next closest to ours after the three-star
Alpha Centauri system. Barnard’s is the nearest single star.
Key Facts
Barnard’s Star, six light-years
away, is notorious among astronomers for a history of false planet detections.
But with the help of high-precision technology, the latest discovery — a family
of four — appears to be solidly confirmed. The tiny size of the planets is
also remarkable: Capturing evidence of small worlds at great distance is a tall
order, even using state-of-the-art instruments and observational techniques.
Details
Watching for wobbles in the light
from a star is one of the leading methods for detecting exoplanets — planets
orbiting other stars. This “radial velocity” technique tracks subtle shifts in
the spectrum of starlight caused by the gravity of a planet pulling its star
back and forth as the planet orbits. But tiny planets pose a major challenge:
the smaller the planet, the smaller the pull. These four are each between about
a fifth and a third as massive as Earth. Stars also are known to jitter and
quake, creating background “noise” that potentially could swamp the
comparatively quiet signals from smaller, orbiting worlds.
Astronomers measure the
back-and-forth shifting of starlight in meters per second; in this case the
radial velocity signals from all four planets amount to faint whispers — from
0.2 to 0.5 meters per second (a person walks at about 1 meter per second). But
the noise from stellar activity is nearly 10 times larger at roughly 2 meters
per second.
How to separate planet signals from
stellar noise? The astronomers made detailed mathematical models of Barnard’s
Star’s quakes and jitters, allowing them to recognize and remove those signals
from the data collected from the star.
The new paper confirming the four
tiny worlds — labeled b, c, d, and e — relies on data from MAROON-X, an
“extreme precision” radial velocity instrument attached to the Gemini Telescope
on the Maunakea mountaintop in Hawaii. It confirms the detection of the “b”
planet, made with previous data from ESPRESSO, a radial velocity instrument
attached to the Very Large Telescope in Chile. And the new work reveals three
new sibling planets in the same system.
Fun Facts
These planets orbit their red-dwarf
star much too closely to be habitable. The closest planet’s “year” lasts a
little more than two days; for the farthest planet, it’s is just shy of seven
days. That likely makes them too hot to support life. Yet their detection bodes
well in the search for life beyond Earth. Scientists say small, rocky planets
like ours are probably the best places to look for evidence of life as we know
it. But so far they’ve been the most difficult to detect and characterize.
High-precision radial velocity measurements, combined with more sharply focused
techniques for extracting data, could open new windows into habitable,
potentially life-bearing worlds.
Barnard’s star was discovered in
1916 by Edward Emerson Barnard, a pioneering astrophotographer.
The Discoverers
An international team of scientists led by Ritvik Basant of the University of Chicago published their paper on the discovery, “Four Sub-Earth Planets Orbiting Barnard’s Star from MAROON-X and ESPRESSO,” in the science journal, “The Astrophysical Journal Letters,” in March 2025. The planets were entered into the NASA Exoplanet Archive on March 13, 2025.
Source: Discovery Alert: Four Little Planets, One Big Step - NASA Science
Planets Form Through Domino Effect - UNIVERSE
New radio astronomy
observations of a planetary system in the process of forming show that once the
first planets form close to the central star, these planets can help shepherd
the material to form new planets farther out. In this way each planet helps to
form the next, like a line of falling dominos each triggering the next in turn.
To date over 5000 planetary systems have
been identified. More than 1000 of those systems have been confirmed to host
multiple planets. Planets form in clouds of gas and dust known as
protoplanetary disks around young stars. But the formation process of multi-planet
systems, like our own Solar System, is still poorly understood.
The best example object to study
multi-planet system formation is a young star known as PDS 70, located 367
light years away in the direction of the constellation Centaurus. This is the
only celestial object where already-formed planets have been confirmed within a
protoplanetary disk by optical and infrared observations (First Confirmed Image of Newborn Planet Caught with ESO’s
VLT (ESO) ). Previous
radio wave observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array
(ALMA) revealed a ring of dust grains outside the orbits of the two known
planets. But those observations could not see into the ring to observe the
details.
In this research, an international team
led by Kiyoaki Doi, formerly a Ph.D. student at the National Astronomical
Observatory of Japan (NAOJ)/the Graduate University for Advanced Studies,
SOKENDAI and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for
Astronomy, performed high-resolution observations of the protoplanetary disk
around PDS 70. The team again used ALMA, but observed at a longer wavelength of
radio waves. This is because longer wavelengths are better for peering into the
dusty cloud of the protoplanetary disk.
The new ALMA observations clearly show a
concentration of dust grains to the north-west (upper right) in the ring
outside the orbits of the two existing planets. The location of this dust clump
suggests that the already-formed planets interact with the surrounding disk,
concentrating dust grains into a narrow region at the outer edge of their
orbits. These clumped dust grains are thought to grow into a new planet. This
work observationally shows that the formation of planetary systems, like the
Solar System, can be explained by the sequential formation of the planets from
inside to outside by the repetition of this process; like a line of falling
dominos, each one triggering the next.
Source: https://www.nao.ac.jp/en/news/science/2024/20241213-alma.html
Image: Compared to the previous
observations (left), the new ALMA observations (right) at longer wavelengths
can better see into the dust ring and reveal a concentration of dust to the
north-west (upper right) where a new planet is forming. (Credit: ALMA
(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), W. M. Keck Observatory, VLT (ESO), K. Doi (MPIA))
Journal article: https://www.soken.ac.jp/en/news/2024/20241213.html
Source: Planets Form Through Domino Effect – Scents of Science
.jpg)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)