New submitter nyri writes: I’m making a two-part study in what kind of societies humans will build on Mars when we start to colonize the red planet. In first part, I’m trying to approach the question sociologically as rigorously as possible. Sociology being what it is, this also includes informed speculation. So, what does Slashdot think: What sort of colonies will humans build on the red planet? How large will they be? How will they make decisions and select their leaders? What kind of judicial systems will they use? What happens if a colony’s population grows larger than they are able to sustain? Will they be religious and if so, how? How will their internal and external economy work? And so on… A second part of the study is of psychometric nature to explore the kind of personalities be present in first colonies. I also encourage you to take the survey.

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Source: Slashdot – Ask Slashdot: What Kind of Societies Will the First Mars Colonies Be?

From a research paper published on ScienceMag journal on Friday: Children resemble their parents in health, wealth, and well-being. Is parent-child similarity in traits and behaviors due to nature (the genes that children inherit from their parents) or nurture (the environment that parents provide for their children)? Answering this enduring question can directly inform our efforts to reduce social inequality and disease burden. Kong et al. used genetic data from trios of parents and offspring to address this question in an intriguing way. By measuring parents’ and children’s genes, they provide evidence that inherited family environments influence children’s educational success, a phenomenon termed genetic nurture. Specifically, Kong et al. show that the part of the parental genotype that children do not inherit can nonetheless predict children’s educational attainment. This genetic nurture effect is an indirect link between parental genotypes and children’s characteristics, not caused by the children’s own biology but rather by the family environment that covaries with parental genes.

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Source: Slashdot – Genes that Your Parents Don’t Pass To You Still Shape Who You Are, Study Finds

An anonymous reader shares a VentureBeat report: If you want to get an idea of how quickly sentiment has shifted against U.S. tech giants, just listen to NYU professor Scott Galloway. […] “After spending the majority of the last two years of my life really trying to understand them and the relationship of the ecosystem, I’ve become 100 percent convinced that it’s time to break these companies up.” It’s an audacious claim from anyone, even more startling coming from someone who has been such a close and bullish observer of these tech giants. Yet for Galloway, it is clear that the four companies have simply become too big, and too powerful. “The premise of my book is that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are our new gods, our new source of love, our consumptive gods,” he said. “And as a result of their ability to tap into these very basic instincts, they’ve aggregated more market cap than the majority of nation’s GDP … I think these entities are more powerful than any entity, with maybe the exception of China and the U.S.” […] Galloway said he wasn’t making his argument based on many of the current emotional outcries against the companies, though these are important to note. And he proceeded to list what he considers to be these giants’ numerous sins. “There are reasons to be angry at them,” he said. “They basically power fake news … So the notion that our platforms have been weaponized by the intelligence unit of a foreign adversary was initially responded to by Facebook as crazy, that we were crazy for thinking that. Then we found out it was millions of people, and now we’re finding out it was hundreds of millions of people who were exposed.”

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Source: Slashdot – Breaking Up Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook Could Save Capitalism, NYU Professor Says