Schools are meant to foster connection, but new research suggests they may also be emotionally isolating spaces for many young people.

A new Flinders University study is challenging the idea that schools are always safe and social spaces for young people, suggesting instead that they can be emotionally isolating environments where loneliness is shaped by harmful social dynamics.

A genomic analysis of over 1,200 people from across South Africa reveals how colonial-era European, Indigenous Khoe-San peoples, and enslaved people contributed to the modern-day gene pool in South Africa. Publishing September 23 in the Cell Press journal The American Journal of Human Genetics, the study found that genes inherited from both colonial Europeans and enslaved people are most common in Cape Town and become less frequent with distance from the colony’s epicenter. The results also show that European ancestors were more likely to be male, whereas Indigenous Khoe-San ancestors were more likely to be female.  

A pair of researchers from the University of Minnesota analyzed years of Taylor Swift’s recorded interviews to track how her dialect has evolved. Their results were published in JASA on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America by AIP Publishing, and show that studying high-profile dialect shifts like Swift’s can help scientists better understand the scope of these dialects, not just in terms of geographic area but also in terms of social group, age, and leadership status.