Recent Science News

Workers who are good at spotting colleagues’ bad moods end up liking their jobs less
Across three studies, being good at perceiving negative emotions at work worsened attitudes toward coworkers and jobs and increased withdrawal, through emotional contagion. Skill at perceiving positive emotions brought no measurable benefit.

Three in four people admit hiding a contagious illness, often so they can still go out
Across 10 studies with 4,110 US adults, about 75% reported concealing an infectious illness from others, mostly for social or work reasons, and people who were actually sick concealed it regardless of how harmful it was.

People in individualist cultures try harder to cheer others up, study of 17 countries finds
Surveys of more than 6,600 people in up to 17 countries, plus a daily diary study, found that members of individualist cultures were more motivated to make others feel better, more likely to express care, and less likely to tell others to suppress emotions.

A medieval monk turned debt collector shows why sanctions kept city loans flowing
When five Holland cities defaulted in the 1480s, creditors in 's-Hertogenbosch sent a Carthusian monk to arrest Holland merchants and seize their goods and land; the reprisals recovered 644 guilders in wares and about 300 guilders a year in seized income.

Doctors in Congress are 66% more effective at passing health legislation
Physicians in the US House sponsor 2.8 more health bills per Congress than other members and are 66% more legislatively effective on health policy, but their bills lean twice as often toward the health industry as toward patients.

US jobs are converging on the same skills, and pay gaps between them are shrinking
Analysing hundreds of millions of US job ads from 2014 to 2022, economists find the skill profiles of 1,326 occupations grew steadily more alike. Pairs of jobs that converged saw their wage gaps narrow and more workers move between them.

A cubic metre of Moon dust could set limits on long-dead alien civilisations
Tiny technological particles could drift across the Galaxy and settle on the Moon. Finding none in a cubic metre of lunar soil would rule out Sun-like stars typically shedding more than about a tenth of an Earth mass of durable debris.