The professional networking site LinkedIn helps users connect through a feature called People You May Know. It was used to test a 50-year-old theory that weaker connections are better than stronger connections for getting ahead in life.
The key to landing your dream job could be connecting with and then sending a single message to a casual acquaintance on social media .
That’s the conclusion of a five-year study of over 20 million users on the professional networking site LinkedIn, researchers report in the Sept. 16 Science . The study is the first large-scale effort to experimentally test a nearly 50-year-old social science theory that says weak social ties matter more than strong ones for getting ahead in life, including finding a good job.
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“The weak tie theory is one of the most celebrated and cited findings in social science,” says network scientist Dashun Wang of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who coauthored a perspective piece in the same issue of Science . This study “provides the first causal evidence for this idea of weak ties explaining job mobility.”
Sociologist Mark Granovetter of Stanford University proposed the weak tie theory in 1973 . The theory, which has garnered nearly 67,000 scientific citations, hinges on the idea that humans cluster into social spheres that connect via bridges ( SN: 8/13/03 ). Those bridges represent weak social ties between people, and give individuals who cross access to realms of new ideas and information, including about job markets.
But the influential theory has come under fire in recent years. In particular, a 2017 analysis in the Journal of Labor Economics of 6 million Facebook users showed that increasing interaction with a friend online, thereby strengthening that social tie, increased the likelihood of working with that friend .
In the new study, LinkedIn gave Sinan Aral, a managerial economist at MIT, and his team access to data from the company’s People You May Know algorithm, which recommends new connections to users. Over five years, the social media site’s operators used seven variations of the algorithm for users actively seeking connections, each recommending varying levels of weak and strong ties to users. During that time, 2 billion new ties and 600,000 job changes were noted on the site.
Aral and his colleagues measured tie strength via the number of mutual LinkedIn connections and direct messages between users. Job transitions occurred when two criteria were met: A pair connected on LinkedIn at least one year prior to the job seeker joining the same company as the other user; and the user who first joined the company was there for at least a year before the second user came onboard. Those criteria were meant in part to weed out situations where the two could have ended up at the same company by chance.
Overall, weak ties were more likely to lead to job changes than strong ones, the team found. But the study adds a twist to the theory: When job hunting, mid-tier friends are more helpful than either one’s closest friends or near strangers. Those are the friends with whom you share roughly 10 connections and seldom interact, Aral says. “They’re still weak ties, but they are not the weakest ties.”
The researchers also found that when a user added more weak ties to their network, that person applied to more jobs overall, which converted to getting more jobs. But that finding applied only to highly digitized jobs, such as those heavily reliant on software and amenable to remote work. Strong ties were more beneficial than weak ties for some job seekers outside the digital realm. Aral suspects those sorts of jobs may be more local and thus reliant on members of tight-knit communities.
The finding that job seekers should lean on mid-level acquaintances corroborates smaller studies, says network scientist Cameron Piercy of the University of Kansas in Lawrence who wasn’t involved in either the 2017 study or this more recent one.
That evidence suggests that the weakest acquaintances lack enough information about the job candidate, while the closest friends know too much about the candidate’s strengths — and flaws. “There’s this medium-ties sweet spot where you are willing to vouch for them because they know a couple people that you know,” Piercy says.
But he and others also raise ethical concerns about the new study. Piercy worries about research that manipulates people’s social media spaces without clearly and obviously indicating that it’s being done. In the new study, LinkedIn users who visited the “My Network” page for connection recommendations — who make up less than 5 percent of the site’s monthly active users — got automatically triggered into the experiment.
And it’s unclear how LinkedIn, whose researchers are coauthors of the study, will use this information moving forward. “When you are talking about people’s work, their ability to make money, this is important,” Piercy says. The company “should recommend weak ties, the version of the algorithm that led to more job attainment, if its purpose is to connect people with work. But they don’t make that conclusion in the paper.”
Another limitation is that the analyzed data lacked vital demographic information on users. That was for privacy reasons, the researchers say. But breaking down the results by gender is crucial as some evidence suggests that women — but not men — must rely on both weak and strong ties for professional advancement, Northwestern’s Wang says.
Still, with over half of jobs generally found through social ties, the findings could point people toward better ways to hunt for a job in today’s tumultuous environment. “You may have seen these recommendations on LinkedIn and you may have ignored them. You think ‘Oh, I don’t really know that person,’” Aral says. “But you may be doing yourself a disservice.”
M.S. Granovetter. The strength of weak ties . American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, May 1973, p. 1,360.
Sujata Gupta is the social sciences writer and is based in Burlington, Vt.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
Traditional treatments for lupus do not work in all patients. Genetically engineering immune cells to destroy immune proteins (illustrated) that damage healthy tissue could put the disease in remission.
Keith Chambers/Science Photo Library/Getty Images Plus
After receiving an experimental treatment to stop the body from attacking itself, five people no longer have any symptoms of lupus.
That treatment, called CAR-T cell therapy, seems to have reset the patients’ immune systems, sending their autoimmune disease into remission , researchers report September 15 in Nature Medicine . It’s not yet clear how long the relief will last or whether the therapy will work for all patients.
Even so, the results could be “revolutionary,” says immunologist Linrong Lu of the Shanghai Immune Therapy Institute at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. CAR-T cell therapy has been used for various types of cancer, but it’s still in testing for autoimmune diseases ( SN: 2/2/22 ).
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In the new study, all five participants went into remission without needing additional drugs beyond the genetically engineered CAR-T cells. The target of those engineered cells — immune cells key for fighting off infections — returned a few months after being wiped out. Some of those cells are primed to attack viruses and bacteria but not the study participants’ healthy cells.
It’s unknown how many people worldwide have lupus, a painful disease in which some immune proteins called antibodies attack healthy tissue and organs ( SN: 4/25/19 ). An estimated 161,000 to 322,000 people in the United States live with the most common form called systemic lupus erythematosus. While there are effective therapies, those treatments don’t work for everyone.
The five people in the study had this common form with symptoms resistant to multiple commonly used lupus drugs, such as hydroxychloroquine. But laboratory studies in mice hinted that CAR-T cells might help. So immunologist Georg Schett and colleagues took T cells from each patient and genetically modified the cells to track down and kill all antibody-producing cells. All five participants — four female and one male ages 18 to 24 — were in remission three months after being treated with the altered cells.
The antibody-producing cells, called B cells, disappeared from blood samples as the CAR-T cells killed them off. But B cells are an important defense against infectious diseases such as measles. Luckily, the immune cells weren’t gone permanently, says Schett, of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany. A few months later, the patients’ bone marrow had made more. The B cells were back; the lupus was not.
“Which means, in a way, that we have a reset of the immune system in these young individuals,” Schett says.
Typically, the immune system has checkpoints that eliminate cells that attack the body instead of a foreign invader. Autoimmune diseases such as lupus occur when these cells that recognize and attack “self” escape scrutiny. For lupus to come back, Schett says, the same mistake may need to happen twice. “So far we think the disease is gone.”
To know for sure, the team needs more time to follow the participants. In August 2021, the researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that the first treated participant, a 20-year-old woman, was in remission three months after receiving the drug . Now, that patient has been healthy for a year and a half, Schett says. The other four have been healthy for six months to a year. Time will tell how long these people will stay lupus-free.
Which people might benefit most from CAR-T cell therapy is not yet clear either. Lupus symptoms and severity vary from person to person. The treatment could, for instance, be most useful for patients who are in earlier stages of the disease before it becomes too severe, Lu says. Still, if future clinical trials prove effective, CAR-T cell therapy could be another way to offer hope to patients with the disease.
Erin I. Garcia de Jesus is a staff writer at Science News . She holds a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Washington and a master’s in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
Giant honeybees form open nests uncovered by other materials and “shimmer” when some predators come near. A study is revealing new details about what sets the bees in motion.
Giant honeybees send waves rippling across their open nests by flipping their abdomens upward in coordination, a sight that approaching predators seem to shy away from. A new study is revealing details about what triggers the behavior, known as shimmering.
That shimmering is strongest when the bees are shown a dark object that moves against a light background under bright ambient light, researchers report in the September Journal of Experimental Biology . The experimental setup simulates animals such as hornets, one of the bees’ main predators, flying against the bright sky, and shows what visual cues set off the behavior, the researchers say.
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The behavior “is intriguing as this is possibly one way in which a species of animal communicates with another to warn that they are capable of defending themselves,” says Kavitha Kannan, a neurobiologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany who was not involved in the study.
Giant honeybees, including Apis dorsata , typically form open nests uncovered by other materials in areas like tree branches and window ledges. In the new study, the researchers worked with two A. dorsata nests in roof rafters. Standing near the hives, behavioral ecologist Sajesh Vijayan moved circular cardboard pieces of different sizes in shades of gray and black against either a gray or a black background. The bees shimmered when a black object moved against the gray backdrop, but not when the contrast was flipped.
That’s probably because the black-on-gray setup “resembles a natural predator or a natural condition,” says Sajesh, who goes by his first name, as is common in many parts of southern India. “These are open-nesting colonies, so they are always exposed to a bright sky.”
The team observed little shimmering during the dim twilight periods of dawn and dusk. Since shimmering is a response meant to be perceived by a predator or other unwelcome visitor, such as a bee from another colony, the researchers think that other defensive behaviors might be at play during dim conditions.
“We also think that shimmering is a specialized response towards hornets because it has not really been reported in cases of birds attacking or birds flying past these colonies,” Sajesh says. Birds, instead, “elicit a mass stinging response.” That could be because approaching birds loom comparatively large in the bees’ visual field, and at that point, the bees’ attitude may be “let’s not take any more chances, just sting,” Sajesh says.
In both hives, shimmering completely vanished when the bees were presented with the smallest objects, in this case a circle four centimeters in diameter. The result suggests that there is a minimum size threshold that triggers the ripples.
Shimmering strength did not wane even when the bees were exposed to the artificial setup repeatedly, perhaps because it’s advantageous to stay vigilant against predators like hornets that make persistent attacks.
How exactly the bees are perceiving the objects in the study is not yet known. “They could be actually seeing this object moving, or they could just be responding to a reduction in their visual field,” Sajesh says.
The researchers plan to explore that question further. They are also designing experiments with LED screens to tweak the background colors and patterns and object shapes to figure out what types of shapes and even motions might matter to the bees.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
At the second annual COVID March to Remember, held in dozens of cities on August 6, 2022, people who’ve survived COVID-19, have long COVID or have lost family members and friends to the disease gathered to bring attention to ongoing needs stemming from the pandemic.
We’ve shed measures that stop the spread of the coronavirus and help prevent excessive disruptions to in-person learning . Without them, and with the absence of nearly any controls in place elsewhere in society, we’re inviting the virus to keep spreading, to find new ways to thwart immunity and to continue to derail plans and routines. And it’s not just a risk to our day-to-day lives, but to our future health. As much as we want to put the pandemic in the rearview mirror, evidence continues to emerge that the coronavirus’s impact will be a recurring, unwelcome feature of many tomorrows.
Scientists predict COVID-19 cases will rise this fall and winter in the United States, as more of life heads indoors during colder weather. The Biden Administration has said there could be 100 million new cases. We have a new aid in the face of a possible surge: a revamped COVID-19 shot targeting the omicron variant , from both Pfizer (for 12 years and up) and Moderna (for 18 years and up), is now available ( SN: 9/2/22 ). Meant as a booster shot, the tweaked vaccine is the original version with added protection against the BA.4 and BA.5 variants. The BA.5 variant is dominant in the United States, accounting for 89 percent of cases at the beginning of September.
Public health officials would like to get as many boosters in arms as possible this fall to temper a rise in cases. We know the original vaccine has done an outstanding job protecting people from severe illness and death . The vaccine has also helped reduced transmission , although this benefit can wane quickly . Overall, the COVID-19 vaccine is a crucial tool to protect public health. But it alone can’t shoulder the entire burden of keeping the virus at bay. Controlling the coronavirus takes a team approach, the vaccine together with masks, ventilation improvements and crowd control ( SN: 4/4/22 ).
Without these additional measures, people will keep getting sick. Claire Taylor, a physician in the United Kingdom, tweeted about her experience having COVID-19 three times this year , in March, June and August, as the omicron family of variants moved through her country. “How can it be sustainable, sensible, bearable even, to get a virus that floors you in the same way multiple times a year?” she wrote.
It doesn’t seem sustainable, sensible or bearable. Not with what the virus can do in the midst of infection, and not with the harms that can linger after an infection subsides. Adults, for example, can face health issues throughout the body after a bout of COVID-19. A study of health records from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reported that, compared with those who haven’t had COVID-19, those who have — whether hospitalized or not — face higher risks of a variety of cardiovascular diseases beyond the initial 30 days post-infection. Other research has found an increased risk of neurological and psychiatric illnesses for two years after a SARS-CoV-2 infection, compared with other respiratory infections.
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On top of the risks from COVID-19 itself is the expected health effects of the pandemic’s disruptions to medical care. A study of a large health care system in Massachusetts found a drop in expected hospitalizations for urgent heart issues during the first year of the pandemic. Breast and ovarian cancer screenings in the United States decreased in 2020 compared with 2018. These delayed and lost health care opportunities may reverberate for years.
And then there is long COVID. Each surge of infections adds to the pool of people suffering from a range of debilitating symptoms that they just can’t shake, from extreme fatigue to brain fog to shortness of breath ( SN: 9/1/22 ). Because it takes time to identify people who develop long COVID, we don’t yet know the toll from the omicron surge earlier this year. But the spike in cases was so large, “I suspect there will be millions of people who acquire long COVID after omicron infection ,” immunobiologist Akiko Iwasaki told Liz Szabo of Kaiser Health News on August 26.
Long COVID can leave people unable to work, which is a threat to their ability to support themselves and maintain health insurance, as well as a looming crisis for the economy. There are already an estimated 16.3 million working-age Americans, meaning those 18 to 65 years old, who have long COVID; 2 million to 4 million of them are out of work because of their illness , a new Brookings Metro report finds. The annual cost of the wages lost is around $170 billion and may be as high as $230 billion.
Those deaths have included a devastating number of children’s parents and caregivers. Approximately 7.5 million children have lost one or both parents to COVID-19 as of May 2022, researchers report in JAMA Pediatrics on September 6. An estimated 10.5 million children have become orphans or lost caregivers. These deaths put children’s education, health and well-being at risk , deficits that cannot be overcome without dedicated societal support ( SN: 2/24/22 ).
We’re just beginning to learn about other health issues that could stem from the virus or the circumstances of the pandemic. A recent U.S. study found an alarming rise in youth-onset type 2 diabetes during the first year of the pandemic compared with the average of the prior two years. New cases jumped by 77 percent in 2020. It’s not clear if the increase is due to COVID-19 infection, shifts in diet or activity or stressors from the pandemic, but the rise has strained existing health services for children with diabetes, the researchers wrote.
The pandemic has also disrupted vital health services for children around the world. A study of 18 low- and lower-middle–income countries found a decline in doctor visits and the delivery of maternal and child health care from March 2020 to June 2021. The lost care is estimated to have led to more than 110,000 excess deaths among children under 5 and more than 3,000 excess deaths among mothers, a threat to recent progress in reducing child and maternal mortality , researchers report August 30 in PLOS Medicine . The pandemic has also interfered with vaccination campaigns , leaving children worldwide vulnerable to vaccine-preventable diseases.
Even newborns may face worsened health as a result of the pandemic. Research on prenatal exposures to maternal infection during the 1918 influenza pandemic has found health issues much later in life for the babies born, including higher rates of cardiovascular disease , kidney disease and diabetes.
In a piece on why studies across the life span of children born to mothers who’ve had COVID-19 are needed, the authors discuss the hypothesis that maternal infections during different trimesters may put the fetal organs developing at the time at risk. For example, the heart develops in the first trimester, the kidneys in the third, so infections in those periods could mean a higher risk later in life of cardiovascular disease or kidney disease, respectively.
This is just a preview of the pandemic’s reach; we’re going to continue to learn of ways COVID-19 will shape our health and our lives going forward. It’s enough to keep me in a mask, and though reasons for donning one undoubtedly vary, I’m far from alone: 31 percent of Americans are masking most or all of the time , while 26 percent are some of the time, according to a poll from late August by The Economist /YouGov.
Considering what we know so far, and with an expected rise in COVID-19 cases on the horizon, reinstating masking and implementing other control measures indoors in the coming months seems prudent. It’s a guard against infections now and may contribute to a healthier tomorrow.
Aimee Cunningham is the biomedical writer. She has a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
An artificial intelligence can decode words and sentences from brain activity with surprising — but still limited — accuracy. Using only a few seconds of brain activity data, the AI guesses what a person has heard. It lists the correct answer in its top 10 possibilities up to 73 percent of the time, researchers found in a preliminary study.
The AI’s “performance was above what many people thought was possible at this stage,” says Giovanni Di Liberto, a computer scientist at Trinity College Dublin who was not involved in the research.
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Developed at the parent company of Facebook, Meta, the AI could eventually be used to help thousands of people around the world unable to communicate through speech, typing or gestures , researchers report August 25 at arXiv.org. That includes many patients in minimally conscious, locked-in or “vegetative states” — what’s now generally known as unresponsive wakefulness syndrome ( SN: 2/8/19 ).
Most existing technologies to help such patients communicate require risky brain surgeries to implant electrodes. This new approach “could provide a viable path to help patients with communication deficits … without the use of invasive methods,” says neuroscientist Jean-Rémi King, a Meta AI researcher currently at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
King and his colleagues trained a computational tool to detect words and sentences on 56,000 hours of speech recordings from 53 languages. The tool, also known as a language model, learned how to recognize specific features of language both at a fine-grained level — think letters or syllables — and at a broader level, such as a word or sentence.
The team applied an AI with this language model to databases from four institutions that included brain activity from 169 volunteers. In these databases, participants listened to various stories and sentences from, for example, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Lewis Carroll’s Alice ’ s Adventures in Wonderland while the people’s brains were scanned using either magnetoencephalography or electroencephalography. Those techniques measure the magnetic or electrical component of brain signals.
Then with the help of a computational method that helps account for physical differences among actual brains, the team tried to decode what participants had heard using just three seconds of brain activity data from each person. The team instructed the AI to align the speech sounds from the story recordings to patterns of brain activity that the AI computed as corresponding to what people were hearing. It then made predictions about what the person might have been hearing during that short time, given more than 1,000 possibilities.
Using magnetoencephalography, or MEG, the correct answer was in the AI’s top 10 guesses up to 73 percent of the time, the researchers found. With electroencephalography, that value dropped to no more than 30 percent. “[That MEG] performance is very good,” Di Liberto says, but he’s less optimistic about its practical use. “What can we do with it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
The reason, he says, is that MEG requires a bulky and expensive machine. Bringing this technology to clinics will require scientific innovations that make the machines cheaper and easier to use.
It’s also important to understand what “decoding” really means in this study, says Jonathan Brennan, a linguist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The word is often used to describe the process of deciphering information directly from a source — in this case, speech from brain activity. But the AI could do this only because it was provided a finite list of possible correct answers to make its guesses.
“With language, that’s not going to cut it if we want to scale to practical use, because language is infinite,” Brennan says.
What’s more, Di Liberto says, the AI decoded information of participants passively listening to audio, which is not directly relevant to nonverbal patients. For it to become a meaningful communication tool, scientists will need to learn how to decrypt from brain activity what these patients intend on saying, including expressions of hunger, discomfort or a simple “yes” or “no.”
The new study is “decoding of speech perception, not production,” King agrees. Though speech production is the ultimate goal, for now, “we’re quite a long way away.”
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
From pulling Mesopotamian war chariots to grinding grain in the Middle Ages, donkeys have carried civilization on their backs for centuries. DNA has now revealed just how ancient humans’ relationship with donkeys really is.
“The history of the donkey has puzzled scientists for years,” says Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France. This discovery shows that donkeys were domesticated in one fell swoop, roughly 3,000 years before horses.
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DNA has great potential for unraveling humankind’s shared history with our animal companions. In 2021, Orlando and his colleagues used DNA from the bones of horses to track their domestication to the Eurasian steppes, in what’s now southwestern Russia, more than 4,200 years ago ( SN: 10/20/21 ).
But the history of donkeys ( Equus asinus ) had remained murky. Today, domesticated donkeys are found all over the globe. A dwindling number of wild asses in Asia and Africa — the closest wild relatives of donkeys — pointed toward one of those continents as the likely donkey homeland.
Archaeological evidence — including a 5,000-year-old Egyptian tablet depicting marching asses, sheep and cattle — zeroed in on Africa as the most probable contender. But genetic studies attempting to pin down when and where donkeys were domesticated have been largely inconclusive.
This was probably because scientists were lacking donkey DNA from many regions of the world, Orlando says. For example, to date, there have been no published genomes from donkeys living south of the equator in Africa. To get a broader diversity of DNA, Orlando and his colleagues gathered 207 genomes from donkeys living in 31 countries, ranging from Brazil to China, along with DNA belonging to 31 donkeys that lived between 4,000 and about 100 years ago.
By comparing these genomes with those of wild asses, the researchers found that all donkeys could trace their lineage back to a single domestication event in East Africa, perhaps in the Horn of Africa, around 5000 B.C. From there, domesticated donkeys spread to the rest of the continent and into Europe and Asia, where they formed genetically distinct groups based on region. Humans have now brought donkeys to nearly every continent on Earth, carrying their genetic legacy with them.
These results add new clarity to the story of donkey domestication, says Emily Clark, a livestock geneticist at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh. “Donkeys are extraordinary working animals that are essential to the livelihoods of millions of people around the globe,” she says. “As humans, we owe a debt of gratitude to the domestic donkey for the role they play and have played in shaping society.”
Exactly why people chose to tame wild asses in Africa thousands of years ago is unclear. But the timing of their first spread across eastern Africa coincides with a period when the Sahara started becoming more arid and expanded ( SN: 5/8/08 ).
“Donkeys are champions when it comes to carrying stuff and are good at going through deserts,” Orlando says. As the desert grew larger, donkeys could have provided much needed help moving goods across the increasingly dry terrain, he says.
The archaeological record for donkeys in Africa outside of Egypt is sparse. The new result could help archaeologists narrow their search to new areas to learn more about the first donkeys and the people who tamed them, Orlando says.
Meanwhile, digging into the genetic diversity that has allowed donkeys to support human endeavors across a range of environmental conditions could put donkeys in the spotlight as climate change exacerbates droughts and threatens to expand deserts around the world ( SN: 3/10/22 ).
“Donkeys still provide tons of support for people living in low- and middle-income countries,” Orlando says. Understanding humankind’s shared history with donkeys “is not just about the past, but could actually be useful in the future.”
Freda Kreier was a fall 2021 intern at Science News . She holds a bachelor’s degree in molecular biology from Colorado College and a master’s in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483).
