news 2017

A new report by Darnell Hunt, dean of social sciences of the UCLA College, takes a critical look at the harmful and far-reaching effects of television writers rooms that do not employ black writers, or employ small numbers of black writers to meet diversity hiring requirements. Nearly two-thirds of all TV shows examined lack a single black writer, the report found.

The famed "bloodless death" of a landmark British poet in the Great War has been investigated by experts from the Humanities and Sciences a century after his death, in a new project undertaken at Cardiff University. Biographical and critical works about Edward Thomas (1878 - 1917) often refer to his "bloodless death", a story that emerged following his death aged just 39 at the Battle of Arras on Easter Monday in 1917.

If you could save the lives of five people by pushing another bystander in front of a train to his death, would you do it? And should it make any difference if that choice is presented in a language you speak, but isn't your native tongue' Psychologists at the University of Chicago found in past research that people facing such a dilemma while communicating in a foreign language are far more willing to sacrifice the bystander than those using their native tongue.

Picture overload hinders children learning new words in storybooks, study finds Less is more when it comes to helping children learn new vocabulary from picture books, according to a new study. While publishers look to produce ever more colourful and exciting texts to entice buyers, University of Sussex psychologists have shown that having more than one illustration per page results in poorer word learning among pre-schoolers.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. Our brains process foreign-accented speech with better real-time accuracy if we can identify the accent we hear, according to a team of neurolinguists. "Increased familiarity with an accent leads to better sentence processing," said Janet van Hell , professor of psychology and linguistics and co-director of the Center for Language Science , Penn State.

An international team of citizen scientists and researchers has identified a major contributor to the dramatic decline of migratory shorebird populations in Australia. University of Queensland School of Biological Sciences researcher Associate Professor Richard Fuller said Australian shorebirds were under threat due to the degradation and destruction of mudflats thousands of kilometres away in north-east Asia.

A new, historically accurate portrait of the most admired and revered romantic leading man in literary history, Fitzwilliam Darcy, has been unveiled for the first time, following new research co-led by QMUL's Professor Amanda Vickery. The new portraits paint a very different picture of the literary heartthrob when compared to modern day TV depictions, portrayed by Hollywood actors such as Colin Firth, Elliot Cowan and Matthew MacFadyen.