Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

What happens when everything falls apart? How do we keep doing business—when the world stops working the way it used to?

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Aug 28

What happens when everything falls apart? 🌍 Join me for the W. P. Carey Research Ideation: Apocalypse Pop-Up Café on Sept 9, 11:30–1:00 @ ASU. Let’s rethink business + resilience in uncertain times. RSVP 👉 www.eventbrite.com/e/research-i...

Research Ideation Lunch

www.eventbrite.com

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Aug 22

Can shared faith help people cooperate on something as complex as health care?

In the U.S., health care sharing ministries (HCSMs) offer a powerful real-world example of how religion can facilitate cooperation.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

#Religion #Cooperation #HealthCare

Religion facilitates cooperation in health care sharing ministries

Religion has been theorized and empirically shown to improve groups' abilities to initiate and maintain cooperation. In the United States, risk-pooling organizations known as health care sharing mi...

www.tandfonline.com

2 4

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Aug 18

Fitness interdependence can unify insights from psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology—offering a framework to solve long-standing puzzles of human cooperation.
#Cooperation #HumanSociality #EvolutionaryTheory

Understanding cooperation through fitness interdependence - Nature Human Behaviour

Some acts of human cooperation are not easily explained by traditional models of kinship or reciprocity. Fitness interdependence may provide a unifying conceptual framework, in which cooperation arise...

Fetal microchimerism and maternal health: A review and evolutionary analysis of cooperation and conflict beyond the womb

1 4

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Aug 4

Your child may live in you forever—literally.

Fetal cells can stay in a mother’s body for decades.

But do they help or hurt?

Our paper uses evolutionary conflict theory to explore how fetal microchimerism affects maternal health.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

During pregnancy, fetal cells migrate into the maternal body and persist postpartum. Our literature review reports microchimerism is associated with maternal health and disease. Using an evolutionary...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Aug 1

What is shame for?

It’s not just a social emotion—it’s an evolved defense mechanism against being devalued by others.

New cross-cultural research shows shame works the same way across the globe.

www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

#EvolutionaryPsychology #Emotions #Anthropology

PNAS

www.pnas.org

Evolutionary foundations for cancer biology

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Jul 28

Why do we get cancer?
It’s not just bad luck—it’s evolution.
This special issue explores how evolutionary biology is reshaping our understanding of cancer: why it exists, how it grows, and what we can do about it.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
#CancerEvolution #Oncology

New applications of evolutionary biology are transforming our understanding of cancer. The articles in this special issue provide many specific examples, such as microorganisms inducing cancers, the ....

Life history trade-offs in cancer evolution - Nature Reviews Cancer

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Jul 21

What if tumors evolve like ecosystems?
We applied life history theory to cancer to explain why tumor cells show such diverse behaviors—from rapid growth to quiet dormancy.
#CancerEvolution #LifeHistoryTheory
www.nature.com/articles/nrc...

Evolutionary life history theory posits that some organisms reproduce rapidly whereas others invest more resources in survival. This framework might help us to understand the diversity of phenotypes t...

The animal nature of spontaneous human laughter

2

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Jul 18

Can you hear a fake laugh?
Turns out: yes, you can.
Our research shows that people can reliably distinguish spontaneous laughter from volitional (fake) laughter, and that each type has unique acoustic signatures.
#Laughter #SocialSignals #CognitiveScience
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Laughter is a universally produced vocal signal that plays an important role in human social interaction. Researchers have distinguished between spont…

www.sciencedirect.com

3

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Jul 12

Abstract submission for ZAMM2025 closes next week (July 15)!
Abstract submission is open for all topics related to zombies, the apocalypse, and anything related to our theme for this year. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting Abstract Submission

Join us in Eureka Springs for an exciting conference about the science, medicine, art and culture of managing apocalyptic risks, in collaboration with the Nightmare in the Ozarks Film Festival. This y...

docs.google.com

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Jul 9

What if there’s no such thing as a unified “self”?
According to a modular view of the mind, what we call the “self” is really a collection of specialized systems, each shaped by evolution to navigate a messy social world.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
#CognitiveScience #ModularMind

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

Adapted for the Apocalypse

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Jun 25

Great conversation with Clay Routledge about my book A Field Guide to the Apocalypse. Humans evolved to be resilient through cooperation, creativity & curiosity. We can thrive, even in turbulent times.
profectusmag.com/adapted-for-...
#ApocalypsePreparedness #HumanFlourishing #Cooperation

The following is an interview with Athena Aktipis about surviving the apocalypse and the human capacity for cooperation, curiosity, and progress.

profectusmag.com

3

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Jun 24

Cooperation doesn't always need complex cognition. Just leaving bad partners behind can be enough to make cooperation evolve. Sometimes, walking away is an evolutionary superpower.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#Evolution #Cooperation #BehavioralEcology

Know when to walk away: contingent movement and the evolution of cooperation

Models of the evolution of cooperation suggest that an important characteristic of successful strategies is the ability to respond contingently to the…

www.sciencedirect.com

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Jun 19

Not all tumors evolve the same way.
Our paper proposes a new framework to classify tumors based on how they evolve and the ecosystems they are embedded in. Say hello to the Evo-Eco Index!
www.nature.com/articles/nrc...
#CancerEvolution #Oncology #PrecisionMedicine

Cancer across the tree of life: cooperation and cheating in multicellularity | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

1 4

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Jun 16

Cancer is not an anomaly - it’s a risk inherent in being multicellular.
By studying it as broken cooperation, we gain a deeper understanding of its nature and how to fight it.
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....
#EvoDevo #Multicellularity #Biomedicine

Multicellularity is characterized by cooperation among cells for the development, maintenance and reproduction of the multicellular organism. Cancer can be viewed as cheating within this cooperative m...

royalsocietypublishing.org

1 6

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Jun 10

What do dancing, drumming & talking have in common?
They all rely on entrainment, our ability to sync with rhythmic patterns. Our paper offers a unifying framework across domains: music, movement, communication, & evolution.
#Entrainment #Rhythm
online.ucpress.edu/mp/article-a...

The Ecology of Entrainment: Foundations of Coordinated Rhythmic Movement

Entrainment has been studied in a variety of contexts including music perception, dance, verbal communication, and motor coordination more generally. Here we seek to provide a unifying framework that ...

online.ucpress.edu

Is eating behavior manipulated by the gastrointestinal microbiota? Evolutionary pressures and potential mechanisms

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Jun 6

What if your food cravings aren’t your cravings?
Our paper explores how gut microbes may hijack your brain to get the food they want.
Yes, your microbes might be manipulating you.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
#Microbiome #GutBrainAxis #FoodCravings

Nutrient competition affects all biological communities, including the human microbiota. Selection favors microbes that can influence their nutrient supply, potentially leading to microbial manipulat...

Cooperation—The Ancient Technology That Never Goes Obsolete

3

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Jun 5

Excited to be featured in Templeton Ideas - the article dives into my work on cooperation, risk sharing, and why we need to teach collaboration as a core human skill.
www.templeton.org/news/houston...
#Cooperation #RiskSharing

In a complicated world filled with risks and unforeseeable disasters, Lee and Aktipis think the urgency is there to activate societies to address seemingly intractable problems through improved cooper...

www.templeton.org

1 2

athenaaktipis.bsky.social @athenaaktipis.bsky.social · Jun 2

Our paper highlights the power & complexity of cancer heterogeneity: we analyzed 1,165 tumor exomes across 12 cancer types using EXPANDS & PyClone.

86% of tumors had ≥2 clones. Intratumor heterogeneity is the rule, not the exception.
#CancerResearch
www.nature.com/articles/nm....

Pan-cancer analysis of the extent and consequences of intratumor heterogeneity - Nature Medicine

The authors analyze the extent of intratumor heterogeneity across 12 tumor types to reveal that increased heterogeneity is a general phenomenon and has a biphasic contribution to tumor progression.