New study reveals wealth inequality’s deep roots in human prehistory
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 6-May-2025 22:09 ET (7-May-2025 02:09 GMT/UTC)
Wealth inequality began shaping human societies more than 10,000 years ago, long before the rise of ancient empires or the invention of writing. That’s according to a new study led by Washington State University archaeologist Tim Kohler that challenges traditional views that disparities in wealth emerged suddenly with large civilizations like Egypt or Mesopotamia. The research is part of a special issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, co-edited by Kohler and Amy Bogaard, an archaeologist at Oxford University in England.
McGill University researchers have developed an AI-powered method to verify the origin of honey, ensuring that what’s on the label matches what’s in the jar. The breakthrough offers a potential solution to a long-standing problem.
“Honey is one of the most fraud-prone commodities in global trade. It often involves mislabelling where it was produced or the types of flowers that bees collected nectar from,” said lead author Stéphane Bayen, Associate Professor and Chair of McGill’s Department of Food Science and Agricultural Chemistry.
A new study cracks the code for increasing sustainability of the pest-killing proteins in genetically engineered crops.
In Finland, farmers who have transitioned to regenerative agriculture perceive intuition as something that leads to better decision-making, a new study from the University of Eastern Finland shows. However, intuition also remains a taboo; a topic that is avoided and rarely discussed.
It’s a game a lot of us played as children—and maybe even later in life: unspooling measuring tape to see how far it would extend before bending. But to engineers at the University of California San Diego, this game was an inspiration, suggesting that measuring tape could become a great material for a robotic gripper. The grippers would be a particularly good fit for agriculture applications, as their extremities are soft enough to grab fragile fruits and vegetables, researchers wrote. The devices are also low-cost and safe around humans.