Surprisingly, the research team found that populations from different regions associated with the Gravettian culture, which was widespread across the European continent between 32,000 and 24,000 years ago, were not closely related to each other. They were linked by a common archaeological culture: they used similar weapons and produced similar portable art. Genetically, however, the populations from western and southwestern Europe (today's France and Iberia) differed from contemporaneous populations from central and southern Europe (today's Czech Republic and Italy).

Furthermore, the gene pool of the western Gravettian populations is found continuously for at least 20,000 years: their descendants who are associated with the Solutrean and Magdalenian cultures stayed in southwestern Europe during the coldest period of the last Ice Age (between 25,000 and 19,000 years ago) and later spread north-eastward to the rest of Europe. "With these findings, we can for the first time directly support the hypothesis that during the Last Glacial Maximum people found refuge in the climatically more favourable region of southwestern Europe" says first author Cosimo Posth.

The Italian peninsula was previously considered to be another climatic refugium for humans during the LGM. However, the research team found no evidence for this, on the contrary: hunter-gatherer populations associated with the Gravettian culture and living in central and southern Europe are no longer genetically detectable after the LGM. People with a new gene pool settled in these areas, instead. "We find that individuals associated with a later culture, the Epigravettian, are genetically distinct from the area‘s previous inhabitants," says co-author He Yu. "Presumably, these people came from the Balkans, arrived first in northern Italy around the time of the glacial maximum and spread all the way south to Sicily."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05726-0

There is an extensive catalogue of services covered by fake interaction resale panels. You can buy any form of interaction from any global or local service,” says one of the study’s authors, Juan Tapiador, a professor in UC3M’s Computer Science Department. Another conclusion reached by the researchers is the level of “customisation” of these services. For example, for many interactions (playing music, watching videos or “likes” on social media) you can choose the geographical origin of the account that will do so and the gender (male or female). “A third interesting finding is the disparity in prices between providers of the same service, which suggests that this is still a developing market where the market value of this service is unknown”, adds Juan Tapiador.

According to the study’s results, the cheapest rates include buying direct traffic to a website, getting “likes” on Instagram or getting views on multimedia platforms. For example, 1000 “likes” on Instagram cost 1.3 euros, while 2 euros can get 1000 views on YouTube or 1000 plays on Spotify. Interestingly, several services are offered for free so customers can check their quality and thus be convinced to invest in different ones. This way, for less than 9 cents you can get 1000 views on TikTok, SoundCloud or Instagram/IGTV. Buying Instagram followers is more expensive: for 4.3 euros you can get 1000. And then there are other more expensive services because they involve some personalisation, such as reviews on Google or TripAdvisor, which range at around 1 euro per text.

As Narseo Vallina-Rodríguez, associate research lecturer at IMDEA Networks and another of the work’s authors, says, “potential consumers of this type of service can be anyone depending on the type of review: from influencers who want to promote their channels on social media to brands trying to promote the visibility of their products”.

This study, recently published in the scientific journal Computers & Security, is part of a wider research project on the ecosystem of services that provide fake activity and identity services on the internet. The aim of this research is to quantify and analyse the evolution of the global market price of services that (re)sell artificial interactions on social media and content distribution platforms, something that has rarely been studied in academic literature, according to the researchers.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167404822004059?via%3Dihub

A new study based on a massive dataset of posts collected from Facebook pages and groups in the runup to the 2020 U.S. Presidential election finds that visual misinformation is widespread across the platform, and that it is highly asymmetric across party lines, with right-leaning images five to eight times more likely to be misleading.

In “Visual misinformation on Facebook,” published this week in the Journal of Communication, scholars from Texas A&M University’s Department of Communication & Journalism, Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and the George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics collected and analyzed nearly 14 million posts from more than 14,000 pages and 11,000 public groups from August through October 2020.

From this corpus, the researchers arrived at a representative data set of political images, and another of images that specifically depicted political figures. An analysis found that 23% of political images in a sample contained misinformation, while 20% of those that depicted a political figure were misleading.

https://techpolicy.press/on-facebook-visual-misinfo-widespread-highly-asymmetric-across-party-lines/

Curtin University researchers believe rising sea temperatures are to blame for the plummeting number of invertebrates such as molluscs and sea urchins at Rottnest Island off Western Australia, with some species having declined by up to 90 per cent between 2007 and 2021.

Lead author Adjunct Professor Fred Wells, from Curtin’s School of Molecular and Life Sciences, said the west end of Rottnest Island had suffered a “catastrophic decline” in biodiversity.

“Since 1982, we have monitored biodiversity of marine molluscs and echinoderms including sea snails, clams, starfish and sea urchins on rocky reefs at Rottnest Island, Cottesloe, Trigg Point and Waterman,” Professor Wells said.

“Despite being sanctuary zones with the highest level of protection from human activities, we found that Radar Reef and Cape Vlamingh at Rottnest Island had suffered a catastrophic decline in biodiversity between 2007 and 2021, likely due to exposure to the warm Leeuwin Current.

“By contrast, the metropolitan coastline, which is not under the influence of the Leeuwin Current, was found to have well-preserved biodiversity and species richness.

“Overall, at the west end of Rottnest Island, the rocky reefs are badly depleted with a decline of 90 percent or more in biodiversity and density of molluscs.”

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2023.1075228/full

Climate change isn’t the only threat facing California’s birds. Over the course of the 20th century, urban sprawl and agricultural development have dramatically changed the landscape of the state, forcing many native species to adapt to new and unfamiliar habitats.

In a new study, biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, use current and historical bird surveys to reveal how land use change has amplified — and in some cases mitigated — the impacts of climate change on bird populations in Los Angeles and the Central Valley.

The study found that urbanization and much hotter and drier conditions in L.A. have driven declines in more than one-third of bird species in the region over the past century. Meanwhile, agricultural development and a warmer and slightly wetter climate in the Central Valley have had more mixed impacts on biodiversity.

“It’s pretty common in studies of the impact of climate change on biodiversity to only model the effects of climate and not consider the effects of land use change,” said study senior author Steven Beissinger, a professor of environmental science, policy and management at UC Berkeley and a researcher at the campus’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ). “But we’re finding that the individual responses of different bird species to these threats are likely to promote unpredictable changes that complicate forecasts of extinction risk.”

The study, publishing today in the journal Science Advances, presents the latest results from UC Berkeley’s Grinnell Resurvey Project, an effort to revisit and document birds and small mammals at sites first surveyed a century ago by UC Berkeley professor Joseph Grinnell.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn0250

Using ensemble learning techniques and longitudinal data from a large naturalistic driving study, researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons have developed a novel, interpretable and highly accurate algorithm for predicting mild cognitive impairment and dementia in older drivers. Digital markers refer to variables generated from data captured through recording devices in the real-world setting. These data could be processed to measure driving behavior, performance and tempo-spatial pattern in exceptional detail. The study is published in the journal Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.

The researchers used an interaction-based classification method for selecting predictive variables in the dataset. This learning model has achieved an accuracy of 96 percent in predicting mild cognitive impairment and dementia, outperforming traditional machine learning models such as logistic regression and random forests -- a statistical technique widely used in AI for classifying disease status. “Our new ensemble learning model based on digital markers and basic demographic characteristics can predict mild cognitive impairment and dementia in older drivers with excellent accuracy,” said Sharon Di, associate professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics at Columbia Engineering and the study’s lead author.

The investigators constructed 200 variable modules using the naturalistic driving data on the driver, the vehicle and the environment captured by in-vehicle recording devices for 2977 drivers participating in the Longitudinal Research on Aging Drivers (LongROAD) project, a prospective cohort study conducted in five sites across the contiguous United States and sponsored by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. At the time of enrollment, the participants were active drivers aged 65-79 years who were cognitively intact. Data used in this study came from the first three years of follow-up, spanning from August 2015 through March 2019. During the follow-up, 36 participants were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, 8 with Alzheimer’s disease, and 17 with other or unspecified dementia.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0933365723000246#b7