Burial Site challenges stereotypes of Stone Age women and children

University of York

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Stone Age tools

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Credit: University of York

Study has revealed new insights into Stone Age life and death, showing that stone tools were just as likely to be buried with women and children as with men.

The discovery, from Zvejnieki cemetery in northern Latvia, one of the largest Stone Age burial sites in Europe, challenges the idea that stone tools were strictly associated with men.

The site was used for more than 5,000 years, and contains over 330 graves, but until now, stone artefacts found in burials had not been studied, with stone tools at Zvejnieki and other Stone Age burial sites often disregarded as utilitarian and therefore uninteresting.  

As part of the Stone Dead Project, led by Dr Aimée Little at the University of York, and working with the Latvian National Museum of History and colleagues across Europe, the team took a powerful microscope to Riga to look at how the tools were made and used.

The research showed that stone tools played a far deeper role in burial rituals, as not only were the tools discovered that had been used to work animal hides, but some tools appear to have been specifically made and then broken as part of funerary rites.

They found that women were as, or even more, likely than men to be buried with stone tools, and that children and older adults were the most common age group to receive stone artefacts.

The long-held stereotype of women in this era was that they played a more domestic role - cooking animals hunted by the men, doing crafts, and caring for the family.

Dr Aimée Little, from the Centre for Artefacts and Materials Analysis, part of the University of York’s Department of Archaeology, said: “The site in Latvia has seen numerous investigations of the skeletal remains and other types of grave goods, such as thousands of animal teeth pendants. 

“A missing part of the story was understanding, with greater depth, why people gave seemingly utilitarian items to the dead.

“Our findings overturn the old stereotype of “Man the Hunter” which has been a dominant theme in Stone Age studies, and has even influenced, on occasion, how some infants have even been sexed, on the basis that they were given lithic tools.” 

Dr Anđa Petrović, from the University of Belgrade, said: “This research demonstrates that we cannot make these gendered assumptions and that lithic grave goods played an important role in the mourning rituals of children and women, as well as men.” 

Tools that had never been used before, hint at their symbolic significance in burial practice, particularly as some tools appear to have been deliberately broken before being placed with the deceased, suggesting a shared ritual tradition across the eastern Baltic region where similar funerary practices have been noted.

Dr Little added: “The study highlights how much more there is to learn about the lives - and deaths - of Europe’s earliest communities, and why even the seemingly simplest objects can unlock insights about our shared human past and how people responded to death.”

The research, published in the journal PLOS One and in collaboration with University of Belgrade, University of Helsinki, the University of Latvia and University of Tartu, is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

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Journal

PLOS One

 

Study links teacher turnover to higher rates of student suspensions, disciplinary referrals

Disciplinary actions were also linked to teachers’ experience levels and Black students were disproportionately affected

New York University

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Studies show that teacher turnover has a negative impact on students’ academic performance, but little is known about other ways that their departures affect student behavior. In a new study of New York City public schools, researchers found that teacher turnover is linked to higher rates of student suspensions and requests from teachers seeking disciplinary action, known as office disciplinary referrals (ODR).

“Teacher turnover has generally been studied for its impact on student achievement, but there are a host of reasons to expect that turnover, which creates disruption and instability, would also lead to more disciplinary infractions and suspensions,” says lead author Luis Rodriguez, associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at NYU Steinhardt. “Replacing teachers disrupts existing teacher–student relationships and can also lead to the loss of crucial contextual knowledge that helps educators interpret and respond to behavior appropriately.”

Using New York City Public School data for grades 6-12 spanning 11 academic years (2011-2012 to 2021-2022), researchers analyzed student characteristics, including demographics, special education status, and disciplinary records; school characteristics, including student enrollment size and teacher-student ratio; and teacher data, including full-time status, years of experience, and resignations (both mid-year and at the end of the year).

In an analysis determining how data relates to a typical change in teacher turnover rates, their findings show a statistically significant relationship between increases in the percentage of teachers who left their schools and increases in the probability of a student receiving an ODR or suspension, particularly for Black students and other students of extremely underrepresented ethnoracial backgrounds.

The article is published in the American Journal of Education.

Key findings:

• When teachers stay, students are less likely to be disciplined. A 13.3% decrease in teachers within a school who left at the end of the school year is correlated with a 5.7% reduction in students receiving an ODR, and a 7.2% reduction in students receiving a suspension.
• Similarly, a 4.5% decrease in teachers who left in the middle of the school year correlated to a 1.9% reduction in students receiving an ODR and a 2.4% reduction of students receiving a suspension.
• Overall, Black students and other students of extremely underrepresented ethnoracial backgrounds were the only students more likely to receive an ODR or suspension with increased turnover.
• As teachers with more years of experience departed mid-year, students’ probability of disciplinary actions increased. The probability that a student received an ODR or suspension increased by roughly 20-30% for each year of experience the departing teachers had, on average.

“As these correlations reflect data at the school level, we expect the resulting estimates are more modest than if we had data that allowed us to estimate how discipline would change after a child’s own teacher left,” says Rodriguez. “However, even with the limitations, these findings suggest that turnover is not just a workforce issue, but also a school climate issue. Our findings reaffirm that policymakers and practitioners must design strategies that both reduce turnover and buffer its effects—through mentorship and induction supports, targeted professional development, and fostering inclusive school cultures.”

 

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Journal

American Journal of Education

DOI

10.1086/737522 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Teacher Turnover and Student Disciplinary Infractions: Evidence from New York City

 

How harmful bacteria hijack crops

Washington University in St. Louis

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By Chris Woolston

Aphids, grasshoppers and other bugs aren’t the only pests that can quickly wipe out a crop. Many harmful bacteria have evolved ways to bypass a plant’s defenses. A once-healthy tomato plant can quickly turn sick and blotchy, thanks to microscopic foes armed with an arsenal of tricks.

In a recent study, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have identified a tool that helps the bacteria Pseudomonas syringae turn a plant’s fundamental biology against itself. The findings, recently published in the prestigious journal mBio, could eventually lead to new approaches to protecting crops, said co-author Barbara Kunkel, a professor of biology in Arts & Sciences. “If we can understand the mechanism behind the infection, we can potentially stop it,” she said.

The lead author of the study is Chia-Yun “Cynthia” Lee, who was a graduate student in Kunkel’s lab at the time of the research and is now a postdoctoral researcher in biology. Maya Irvine, an undergraduate research assistant at the time of the research, is another co-author.

Plant-associated bacteria are known to exploit a crucial plant hormone called auxin, Kunkel said. The hormone, found in all land-based plants from mosses to trees, has a variety of functions, including promoting growth and, crucially, regulating responses to the environment.

The WashU team suspects P. syringae and other bacteria have developed a way to “listen” to the plant’s auxin signaling process. When the germs notice that the plant is producing more auxin, they ramp up their attack.

“The release of auxin tells the bacteria that the attack is working, so they multiply and become even more aggressive,” Kunkel said. “It’s a sneaky way to take advantage of and manipulate the plant’s biology.”

But a key question remained: How can bacteria pick up on a plant’s chemical signal? To answer that question, the WashU team took a close look at the molecular and genetic machinery of P. syringae as it attacked thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), a plant from the mustard family used in many studies at WashU and elsewhere. “We started hunting for bacterial genes that could be involved in sensing auxin, and we found a good candidate,” Lee said.

The team identified a particular protein called PmeR that seemed to fit the bill. Not only could it detect auxin — or, more specifically, a separate compound associated with auxin — it can also activate certain genes in bacteria that make the germs more aggressive and virulent. “Once bacteria sense indirectly that the auxin is there, they change their gene expression to set themselves up to better survive inside the plant,” Kunkel said.

This insight into the complicated crosstalk between plants and their bacterial attackers could eventually lead to new approaches to protecting crops, Kunkel said. There’s no obvious way to target the PmeR protein in wild bacteria, and it’s certainly not possible to block or remove the vitally important hormone auxin from tomatoes or any other plant. But there may be another possible approach.

Kunkel’s group is working with Joe Jez, the Spencer T. Olin Professor in Biology, to see if it might be possible to make pathogenic bacteria “blind” to auxin.

“If we understood more about how bacteria sense auxin, we could potentially develop a compound that mimics auxin or auxin-related molecules and confuses the bacteria and blocks this system that makes them virulent,” Kunkel said. “Perhaps we could spray fields with this compound.”

Before any such compound could become a reality, researchers would need to better understand the physical structure of the molecules involved. “That’s where Joe comes in,” Kunkel said. “He has the tools and the insight to figure out even the most complicated structures.”

Researchers are still a long way away from stopping P. syringae or other bacteria in their quest to find new plants to infect. But understanding the tools of the attack remains an important and exciting development, Lee said. “The communication between bacteria and plants is more complicated than we originally thought, but we’re making progress.”

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Journal

mBio

 

Crowded conditions muddle frogs’ mating choices

New animal research shows female treefrogs may not get the mate they likely want in crowded environments, and those conditions may hamper evolution

University of Tennessee at Knoxville

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Female treefrogs usually prefer a mate with a faster and more regular call, but among numerous calls in a chorus they may have trouble finding the right one.

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Credit: University of Tennessee

Female treefrogs prefer a mate with an impressive call, but the crowded environments give unattractive males an edge, according to a new international study led by Assistant Professor Jessie Tanner of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

When choosing among only two males, female gray treefrogs pick the mate with faster and more regular calls. Faced with four or eight types of calls, however, their choices were inconsistent, according to the study recently published in the biological sciences journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In the wild, frogs usually are choosing mates in noisy, crowded environments called choruses, with many males calling at the same time. “Our study suggests that female treefrogs might not be able to get what they want when they choose in naturally crowded choruses,” said Tanner, a faculty member in both the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. She collaborated with scientists at Colorado State University, the University of Minnesota, and Tel Aviv University in Israel on the study.

“Because female mate choice can drive evolution, our results suggest that evolution might happen more slowly than we thought before,” she said. “Some males that are fairly unattractive could still mate, especially if they take advantage of crowded spaces where females might be less able to discriminate between attractive and unattractive males.”

Examining Choice Overload

Researchers designed the study to investigate “choice overload,” when having too many options hampers decision-making. Humans faced with too many types of toothpaste at the grocery store or profiles on a dating app might choose something they would not usually choose, take longer to decide, or put off a decision until later, Tanner explained.

“We wanted to understand how having to make mating decisions in crowded environments, where choice overload could be a problem, might drive the evolution of calls,” she said. “Since males that are chosen by females pass on their genes to the next generation, this mate choice can cause the population to change over time.”

Expanding Animal Behavior Studies

Tanner also has been studying choice overload in animals with Assistant Professor Claire Hemingway under UT’s Collaborative for Animal Behavior (CoLAB).

“Our lab is working to understand how choice overload and noise may each contribute to the difficulty female treefrogs face in making mating decisions,” Tanner said. “We are also working to understand whether this choice overload is something that occurs generally in many different kinds of animals or is more specific to individual species.”

Tanner is collaborating with Hemingway to study choice overload in bumblebees, and both are working with Professor Todd Freeberg to understand whether wood roaches experience choice overload.

Tanner began behavior research on mate choice as an undergraduate, but she also had an interest in acoustic phenomena, fueled by her fascination with language and music. As a postdoctoral researcher she led a study to understand how noise affects mate choice in crickets, which also use acoustic signals to attract mates. 

“During that study, it became clear that our work was consistent with both the possibility that many simultaneous cricket songs created noise that made it hard for females to hear, and the possibility that the females were experiencing choice overload,” Tanner said. “Our current work looks to disentangle those ideas.”

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Journal

Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Complex choice environments shelter unattractive signallers from sexual selection

Article Publication Date

8-Sep-2025

 

New ways of producing methanol from electricity and biomass

FAU researchers develop process for sustainable on-site production

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

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In future, it could become easier to manufacture methanol from biomass decentrally on site. Researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) are proposing a method with which raw and waste materials from plants can be processed in a self-contained procedure under mild reaction conditions. This method means that the complex drying and transportation of biomass to large biomass gasification plants becomes superfluous. The results were published in the journal Green Chemistry.

Methanol is a versatile basic chemical and promising energy carrier – for example, as a drop-in fuel that can be used directly in existing vehicles. The methyl alcohol with the chemical formula CH3OH is currently mainly gained from fossil natural gas, making this process incompatible with long-term climate goals. “Sustainable methanol from biomass will be able to compensate a proportion of methanol production from fossil fuels in future. However, the current methods mean that this process is very complex and uses large amounts of energy,” says Dr. Patrick Schühle from the Chair of Chemical Reaction Engineering at FAU.

Research into methanol synthesis from biomass has primarily focused on biomass gasification up to now. During this process, waste material from agriculture or forestry and waste products such as hydrolysates from paper manufacturing is first dried, often ground up and subsequently transported to large gasification plants. The material is firstly converted into synthesis gas at temperatures of up to 1000 degrees Celsius and subsequently converted into methanol at pressures of between 50 and 100 bar. Since dry biomass has a lower volumetric energy density, it is often made into pellets before being transported, which means additional costs are involved.

80 percent carbon efficiency

The new method has a decisive advantage in that it enables wet biomass such as pomace, grass cuttings, wood chips or straw to be processed without prior drying. Since further processing such as shredding and pelleting is not required and hardly any external process heat, smaller plants can also be used. “This process allows methanol to be produced in a more decentralized manner than was previously possible”, says Patrick Schühle. “Investing in this new technology could definitely be worthwhile for large farms or forestry operations or agricultural cooperatives.” The researchers have also been using the expertise of OxFA GmbH, a company based in Scheßlitz near Bamberg, that is a world leader in producing formic acid from biomass.

Competitive costs

Since the costs for methanol production mainly depend on the availability of green hydrogen, the researchers incorporated an electrolyzer into their design. It produces the oxygen and the hydrogen required for the reaction by splitting water. Schühle: “Electrolysis requires large amounts of energy. Ideally, the electricity required comes from renewable sources, such as photovoltaics or a local windfarm.” Agrivoltaics, which is the use of agricultural land for producing both food and electricity, is increasingly being discussed in this context. With feed-in tariffs continuing to stagnate or even decline, it is becoming more economically attractive to use electricity generated by PV to produce methanol. In addition, it would be possible to produce methanol by storing formic acid temporarily only when electricity prices are particularly favorable.

“We have calculated that green methanol could be produced in future at a similar cost to methanol produced using natural gas,” explains Patrick Schühle. “This means it could make a meaningful contribution to the defossilization of our industrial landscape from an economic point of view.”

DOI: 10.1039/D5GC01307K

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Journal

Green Chemistry

DOI

10.1039/D5GC01307K 

Article Title

Methanol production in a sustainable, mild and competitive process: concept launch and analysis

Article Publication Date

10-Jul-2025

 

Even healthy children can be severely affected by RSV

Karolinska Institutet

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It is not only premature babies and children with underlying diseases who suffer from serious respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections. Even healthy, full-term babies are at significant risk of intensive care or prolonged hospitalisation – especially during the first three months of life. This is according to a comprehensive registry study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden published in The Lancet Regional Health – Europe.

RSV is a common cause of respiratory infections in young children and accounts for around 245,000 hospital admissions annually in Europe. Researchers have now analysed data from over 2.3 million children born in Sweden between 2001 and 2022 to find out who is at greatest risk of suffering serious complications or dying from an RSV infection.

Preventive treatment available

It is well-known that premature babies and children with chronic diseases are at increased risk of developing severe illness when infected with RSV. It is also known that children under three months of age are particularly vulnerable, but it has not been entirely clear how common severe disease is among previously healthy children. The study shows that the largest group among the children who needed intensive care or were hospitalised for a long period of time were under three months of age, previously healthy and born at full term.

“When shaping treatment strategies, it is important to take into account that even healthy infants can be severely affected by RSV,” says the study’s first author, Giulia Dallagiacoma, a physician and doctoral student at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet. “The good news is that there is now preventive treatment that can be given to newborns, and a vaccine that can be given to pregnant women.”

Starting September 10, 2025, all newborns in Sweden will be offered preventive treatment with antibodies during the RSV season. The drug works much like a vaccine and protects against severe RSV infection for about six months.

Several risk factors identified

A total of 1.7 per cent of the children in the study were diagnosed with RSV infection. Among those, just under 12 per cent (4,621 children) had a severe course of illness. The median age of children who needed intensive care was just under two months, and the majority of them had no underlying disease.

The researchers identified several factors that were linked to an increased risk of needing intensive care or dying. Children who were born in the winter, or had siblings aged 0–3 years or a twin, had approximately a threefold increased risk, while children who were small at birth had an almost fourfold increased risk. Children with underlying medical conditions had more than a fourfold increased risk of severe illness or death.

“We know that several underlying diseases increase the risk of severe RSV infection, and it is these children who have so far been targeted for protection with the preventive treatment that has been available,” says the study’s last author, Samuel Rhedin, resident physician at Sachs’ Children and Youth Hospital and associate professor at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet. “However, the study highlights that a large proportion of children who require intensive care due to their RSV infection were previously healthy. Now that better preventive medicines are available, it is therefore positive that the definition of risk groups is being broadened to offer protection during the RSV season to previously healthy infants as well.”

The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers at the University of Helsinki and Helsinki University Hospital in Finland. It was funded by Karolinska Institutet, the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation, the Swedish Asthma and Allergy Association’s research fund and Region Stockholm, among others. Some of the researchers have received consulting fees from pharmaceutical companies, but these are unrelated to the current study. See the scientific article for more information about potential conflicts of interest.

Publication: “Risk factors for severe outcomes of respiratory syncytial virus infection in children: a nationwide cohort study in Sweden”, Giulia Dallagiacoma, Cecilia Lundholm, Awad I Smew, Emma Caffrey Osvald, Pekka Vartiainen, Santtu Heinonen, Tobias Alfvén, Catarina Almqvist, Samuel Rhedin, The Lancet Regional Health – Europe, online 10 September 2025, doi: 10.1016/j.lanepe.2025.101447.

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Journal

The Lancet Regional Health - Europe

DOI

10.1016/j.lanepe.2025.101447 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Risk factors for severe outcomes of respiratory syncytial virus infection in children: a nationwide cohort study in Sweden

Article Publication Date

10-Sep-2025

UK

Retail workers face ‘abhorrent abuse’ at work, USDAW general secretary says

Chris Jarvis 

Today
 Left Foot Forward

In an interview with Left Foot Forward, Joanne Thomas praised Labour for taking action on it

Retail workers in the UK face ‘abhorrent abuse’ at work, Joanne Thomas – general secretary of retail union USDAW – has claimed. Thomas made the comments in an interview with Left Foot Forward at this year’s Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Brighton.

Speaking to Left Foot Forward about her union’s ‘Freedom From Fear’ campaign, Thomas said: “The Freedom From Fear campaign we’ve been running for decades now [is] really to highlight the abhorrent abuse that retailers get doing their jobs, whether it be verbal abuse, physical abuse or anywhere across that spectrum. It can be a awful place to work.”

She went on to say: “We’ve been campaigning for a standalone offence now similar to what you have when you assault a police officer,” before adding: “This is something that we’re really pleased that is going to happen under Labour – it’s a preventative measure to support our members in retail and something that we can build upon to just try to make their workplaces as safe as possible.”

This isn’t the only thing that Thomas praised Labour for since they entered government last summer. While acknowledges there have been “challenges” for the government since then, she nonetheless told Left Foot Forward she is positive about their record so far.

Thomas said: “For me and I think in the trade union movement in general, the Employment Rights Bill is the [most] significant, most valuable uplift workers have had in a very very long time. That’s something that – when it’s implemented – will make a huge difference on improving workers’ lives, from a really great financial perspective, particularly in USDAW because we represent low paid workers that are on small contracts. So by creating fair contracts, they can get access to better mortgage rates, better rates on loans – all of the things that flow from a contract, they make a huge difference from a financial perspective.

“But also just having that security from getting the rights to sick pay from day one, not being fearful of not being able to go into work because it’s going to cause you financial hardship are just some of the elements that USDAW members in particular would benefit from.”

She went on to say: “I think we have to recognise that’s being delivered from a Labour government. I don’t think it would be delivered from any other party, I think we have to accept that.”

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward