Volume 8 Issue 11, November 2024

Many trans people menstruate, yet they are often ignored in discourses around menstruation. A.J. Lowik, a trans person and reproductive health researcher, explains why this needs to change.

In India, menstruation is stigmatized. Yet, the beginning of menstruation is a crucial time for adolescents. Merely ensuring hygienic practices is not enough to support adolescent well-being. We explain the value of a broader approach to menstrual health.

Myths about menstruation are pervasive and it is time to shatter them. We asked six scientists for their perspective on menstrual myths, including beliefs about food, mood, blood and pain. They highlight gaps between misconceptions, traditions and scientific understanding, and the hurt caused by our collective ignorance and persistent social norms.

Despite much anecdotal evidence, few studies show pervasive racial bias in promotion and tenure decisions. By analysing 1,571 real promotion and tenure cases across five US universities, Masters-Waage et al. find double standards negatively applied to scholars of colour, and especially women of colour, even after accounting for scholarly productivity.

Our ears are known for their ability to detect fine temporal features of sound. But what about our sense of smell? Yuli Wu and colleagues have discovered that humans can discriminate between odour sequences with an impressive temporal precision of 120 ms, which reveals an unprecedented temporal sensitivity in human olfaction.

We found that across a sample of 51 diverse languages, consonants at the beginning of words are on average 13 ms longer than their non-initial counterparts. Considering that this finding is robust across languages from all over the world, we argue that this effect helps to mark the boundaries of different words in the continuous stream of speech.

From 2018 to 2022, 48 anti-transgender laws were enacted in the USA across 19 states. This study shows that these anti-transgender laws increased past-year suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary young people by as much as 72%.

Masters-Waage et al. report that underrepresented minority (URM) faculty in the USA face barriers in the promotion and tenure process, receiving more negative votes and fewer unanimous positive decisions at the college level. This is partly due to a double standard: URM faculty are held to a higher standard than non-URM faculty in terms of scholarly productivity.

Wu et al. show that involving citizens in local decision-making (participatory budgeting) improves civic engagement in a Chinese context.

Blum et al. report evidence of lengthening of word-initial consonants across a diverse sample of 51 languages. On average, these consonants are 13 ms longer than word-medial ones, helping mark word boundaries in continuous speech, which is crucial for understanding speech.

Using a dataset spanning 74 countries, Pertl et al. show that emotions predict intertemporal and risky decision-making. These relationships are stronger in more economically developed and individualistic countries.

How do people track information flow through social networks? New research finds that extended periods of rest, such as sleep, help people build abstract cognitive maps that identify efficient routes between remotely connected network members.

Olfaction has traditionally been considered a slow sense. Using a precise sniff-triggered apparatus, Wu et al. show that people can distinguish fine odour dynamics, with a temporal sensitivity within 120 milliseconds—or well within a single sniff.

Contier et al. show that dimensions are superior to categories at predicting brain responses to visual objects.

Frömer et al. show using EEG that stimulus-locked activity can mimic an evidence accumulation process when aligned to the response.

Loneliness was found to be linked to increased risk for 30 out of 56 diseases in a UK Biobank study. However, genetic analyses show that loneliness likely causes only six diseases. These findings suggest that loneliness is more a potential surrogate marker than a direct cause for most diseases.

Repetto et al. provide an analysis of the genetic basis of variation of neuro-related protein levels in plasma and link this to human behaviour and disorders.

Using genome-wide association studies and meta-analyses on dimensions of personality from large existing datasets, Gupta et al. find novel genomic loci that refine our understanding of the genetic architecture of complex traits.