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1. Strategies for the Inclusion of Human Members within Human-Robot Teams

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3319502.3374808  

   Strohkorb Sebo, Sarah; Dong, Ling Liang; Chang, Nicholas; Scassellati, Brian (March 2020, Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction)

   Team member inclusion is vital in collaborative teams. In this work, we explore two strategies to increase the inclusion of human team members in a human-robot team: 1) giving a person in the group a specialized role (the 'robot liaison') and 2) having the robot verbally support human team members. In a human subjects experiment (N = 26 teams, 78 participants), groups of three participants completed two rounds of a collaborative task. In round one, two participants (ingroup) completed a task with a robot in one room, and one participant (outgroup) completed the same task with a robot in a different room. In round two, all three participants and one robot completed a second task in the same room, where one participant was designated as the robot liaison. During round two, the robot verbally supported each participant 6 times on average. Results show that participants with the robot liaison role had a lower perceived group inclusion than the other group members. Additionally, when outgroup members were the robot liaison, the group was less likely to incorporate their ideas into the group's final decision. In response to the robot's supportive utterances, outgroup members, and not ingroup members, showed an increase in the proportion of time they spent talking to the group. Our results suggest that specialized roles may hinder human team member inclusion, whereas supportive robot utterances show promise in encouraging contributions from individuals who feel excluded. 

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2. Future of the human climate niche

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910114117  

   Xu, Chi; Kohler, Timothy A.; Lenton, Timothy M.; Svenning, Jens-Christian; Scheffer, Marten (May 2020, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   All species have an environmental niche, and despite technological advances, humans are unlikely to be an exception. Here, we demonstrate that for millennia, human populations have resided in the same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe, characterized by a major mode around ∼11 °C to 15 °C mean annual temperature (MAT). Supporting the fundamental nature of this temperature niche, current production of crops and livestock is largely limited to the same conditions, and the same optimum has been found for agricultural and nonagricultural economic output of countries through analyses of year-to-year variation. We show that in a business-as-usual climate change scenario, the geographical position of this temperature niche is projected to shift more over the coming 50 y than it has moved since 6000 BP. Populations will not simply track the shifting climate, as adaptation in situ may address some of the challenges, and many other factors affect decisions to migrate. Nevertheless, in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a MAT >29 °C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara. As the potentially most affected regions are among the poorest in the world, where adaptive capacity is low, enhancing human development in those areas should be a priority alongside climate mitigation. 

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3. Unfolding the evolution of human cognition

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.06.008  

   Miller, Jacob A.; Weiner, Kevin S. (July 2022, Trends in Cognitive Sciences)
4. Cells of the adult human heart

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2797-4  

   Litviňuková, Monika; Talavera-López, Carlos; Maatz, Henrike; Reichart, Daniel; Worth, Catherine L.; Lindberg, Eric L.; Kanda, Masatoshi; Polanski, Krzysztof; Heinig, Matthias; Lee, Michael; et al (December 2020, Nature)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. Advanced insights into disease mechanisms and therapeutic strategies require a deeper understanding of the molecular processes involved in the healthy heart. Knowledge of the full repertoire of cardiac cells and their gene expression profiles is a fundamental first step in this endeavour. Here, using state-of-the-art analyses of large-scale single-cell and single-nucleus transcriptomes, we characterize six anatomical adult heart regions. Our results highlight the cellular heterogeneity of cardiomyocytes, pericytes and fibroblasts, and reveal distinct atrial and ventricular subsets of cells with diverse developmental origins and specialized properties. We define the complexity of the cardiac vasculature and its changes along the arterio-venous axis. In the immune compartment, we identify cardiac-resident macrophages with inflammatory and protective transcriptional signatures. Furthermore, analyses of cell-to-cell interactions highlight different networks of macrophages, fibroblasts and cardiomyocytes between atria and ventricles that are distinct from those of skeletal muscle. Our human cardiac cell atlas improves our understanding of the human heart and provides a valuable reference for future studies. 

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5. Are the roots of human economic systems shared with non-human primates?

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.12.026  

   Addessi, Elsa; Beran, Michael J.; Bourgeois-Gironde, Sacha; Brosnan, Sarah F.; Leca, Jean-Baptiste (February 2020, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews)