A team of researchers including Princeton anthropologist Agustín Fuentes has found, deep in a cave system in South Africa, that an extinct, small-brained species of ancient human relatives buried their dead and used symbols, a discovery that could alter our understanding of human evolution.

Led by paleoanthropologist and National…

Rachel Sturley came to Princeton with a curiosity about biology and a love for literature that started, respectively, in the tide pools of coastal Massachusetts and the New York subway.

The daughter of biologists, Sturley spent summers at the Science School at the marine facility at Woods Hole while her parents did research. “We’d…

Shoppers like flawless diamonds, but for quantum physicists, the flaws are the best part.

Senior Elisabeth Rülke has spent the past year using lasers and flawed diamonds — tiny wafers of diamond with flaws the size of a single atom — to develop a quantum sensor.

Unlike quantum computers, which are still more theoretical than…

Two projects – one on who finances eviction and the other on using AI to study persuasive speech — have been awarded grants through the Dean for Research Innovation Fund for…

Long before Leah Boustan was a professor of economics at Princeton, she was a Princeton undergraduate putting the final touches on her senior thesis.

Working alongside her adviser, longtime professor Henry “Hank” Farber, Boustan published a 100-page research project that compared outcomes for students who dropped out of high school in…

A major international project based at Princeton to digitize a “lost archive” from an 18th-century convent and two faculty book projects have received research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in a round of grants to…

As busy people, we juggle many tasks, keep many balls in the air, and try to avoid letting anything drop. In class, instructors toss out ideas; sometimes they go over our heads, but other times we grasp them quickly.

The sentences above contain familiar metaphors, sometimes called clichés: common words or phrases borrowed from physical…

In the face of a global pandemic, with more than 200 million global infections and 4 million deaths, and despite unprecedented efforts by public health officials, celebrities and influencers to convince everyone to wear masks and get vaccinated as soon possible, the results are mixed.

Now, two Princeton researchers have discovered an…

Data-driven public policy depends on data. And, in the area of technology policy, access to data has been a significant barrier to research. Concerned about how online services might intrude on privacy, push hyper-partisan misinformation, or disadvantage their competitors? Those services aren’t sharing the relevant data with researchers.

Climate change and social inequality are two pressing issues that often overlap. A new study led by Princeton researchers offers a roadmap for cities to address inequalities in energy use by providing fine-grained methods for measuring both income and racial disparities in energy use intensity. Energy use intensity, the amount of energy used…