Your brain can trick you into liking artificial sweeteners

For more than 1 million years, early humans in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean used a range of heavy tools, such as massive handaxes and stone balls, for important tasks, including processing animal carcasses. But then, approximately 200,000 years ago, heavy tools disappeared almost entirely from the fossil record, while the number of lighter tools increased. These included blades, flakes, and specialized scrapers.

A new study, published in the British Journal of Management, examines the high-profile cases of Theranos, Purdue Pharma, Enron, and Wirecard, and claims that the desire to pin the blame on individuals has allowed the systemic environment enabling each collapse to be overlooked.

In the clonal raider ant (Ooceraea biroi), workers in a colony alternate between caring for larvae and laying eggs in a coordinated cycle. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena have discovered a brood pheromone released by larvae of clonal raider ants that temporarily suppresses egg-laying in adult ants.