News from the Mint Group

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Harvard, and PSL University, have designed a gaming applet where players compete to classify the letter shapes of the world's writing systems. Researchers will better understand how letter shapes evolve to be distinctive and informative thanks to this crowdsourced typology. more

Writing evolves to become simpler and more efficient, according to a new study based on the analysis of an isolated West African writing system. more

A recent study in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior proposes a novel method of phylogenetic reconstruction using dynamic community detection more

Soapbox Science Munich will host Dr. Yoolim Kim and other women scientists talking about their research at Max-Joseph-Platz on 24 July more

Collaborative art project on the popular web platform Reddit reveals the structure of cultural change. more

A smartphone game designed by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History aims to study how languages evolve. more

Piers Kelly is co-editor of this new edited volume on Australian kinship systems. Australia is unique in the world for its diverse and interlocking systems of Indigenous social organisation. Arising from the large-scale AustKin project, this book presents recent original research by a range of authors in the field on the kinship and social category systems in Australia. more

In a new video from Latest Thinking, Olivier Morin explains his recent reserach, in which he examined the letters of 116 writing systems from all over the world. more

The orientation of strokes within letters reveals surprising patterns that hardly changed in 3000 years. more

Aug 09, 2016
Press release to: Piers Kelly more