BACKGROUND The question of how to measure, assess and optimise the returns from investment in health and medical research (HMR) is a highly policy-relevant issue. Research Impact Assessment Frameworks (RIAFs) provide a conceptual measurement framework to assess the impact from HMR. The aims of this study were (1) to elicit the views of Medical Research Institutes (MRIs) regarding objectives, de...

Long-term field studies have revealed considerable behavioural differences among groups of wild Pan troglodytes. Here, we report three sets of cladistic analyses that were designed to shed light on issues relating to this interpopulation variation that are of particular relevance to palaeoanthropology. In the first set of analyses, we focused on the proximate cause of the variation. Some resear...

INTRODUCTION Translational research is central to international health policy, research and funding initiatives. Despite increasing use of the term, the translation of basic science discoveries into clinical practice is not straightforward. This systematic search and narrative synthesis aimed to examine factors enabling or hindering translational research from the perspective of basic and clini...

This paper introduces a collection of related research studies on the anthropological demography of Europe. Anthropological demography is a specialty within demography that uses anthropological theory and methods to provide a better understanding of demographic phenomena in current and past populations. Its genesis and ongoing growth lies at the intersection of demography and socio-cultural ant...

In recent years, laboratory studies of cultural evolution have become increasingly prevalent as a means of identifying and understanding the effects of cultural transmission on the form and functionality of transmitted material. The datasets generated by these studies may provide insights into the conditions encouraging, or inhibiting, high rates of innovation, as well as the effect that this h...

We discuss the importance of narrative intelligence (story-awareness, story-telling, historical grounding) in regard to an agent’s transcendence of its immediate local temporal context to create a broad temporal horizon in which the experience and future of the agent can be accounted for, together with the advantage that narrative provides to sociality by making the experience of others availab...

Errors occur commonly in healthcare and can cause significant harm to patients. Most errors arise from a combination of individual, system, and communication failures. Neurologists may be involved in harmful errors in any practice setting and should familiarize themselves with tools to prevent, report, and examine errors. Although physicians, patients, and ethicists endorse candid disclosure of...

It has been proposed that cultural evolution was made possible by a cognitive transition brought about by onset of the capacity for self-triggered recall and rehearsal. Here we develop a novel idea that models of collectively autocatalytic networks, developed for understanding the origin and organization of life, may also help explain the origin of the kind of cognitive structure that makes cul...

Although most people are religious, there are hundreds of millions of religious disbelievers in the world. What is religious disbelief and how does it arise? Recent developments in the scientific study of religious beliefs and behaviors point to the conclusion that religious disbelief arises from multiple interacting pathways, traceable to cognitive, motivational, and cultural learning mechanis...

Evidence for interactions between populations plays a prominent role in the reconstruction of historical and prehistoric human dynamics; these interactions are usually interpreted to reflect cultural practices or demographic processes. The sharp increase in long-distance transportation of lithic material between the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, for example, is seen as a manifestation of the c...