In a paper released in Royal Society Open Science, Robin Dunbar, a psychologist at Oxford University talks about the number of social relationships an individual can maintain. Known as the Dunbar’s number, 150 is the number of people an individual can maintain relationships with. Then the question of whether modern social media changes that number needs to be addressed. Dunbar surveyed 2,000 people (first national scale random sample study) of regular social media users and 1375 adults who may or may not use Facebook. Studies prove Dunbar’s number. Other numbers that came out of this testing was most people had 5 friends who they could turn for an emergency and 15 friends they call close friends. It gives more evidence to the theory that there is a cognitive limit on how much the brain can handle, despite Facebook’s ability to expand the network.

Read the full article here: http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21688846-online-social-networks-do-not-change-fundamentals-friendship-done-bar

The more social ties people have at an early age, the better their health is at the beginnings and ends of their lives, according to a new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The study is the first to definitively link social relationships with concrete measures of physical wellbeing such as abdominal obesity, inflammation, and high blood pressure, all of which can lead to long-term health problems, including heart disease, stroke and cancer.

Read the full article here: http://uncnews.unc.edu/2016/01/04/social-networks-as-important-as-exercise-and-diet-across-the-span-of-our-lives/

Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research(link is external), London, compared proteins inside cells to members of an enormous social network, mapping the ways they interact. This allowed them to predict which proteins will be most effectively targeted with drugs.The team found that there are many molecular pathways that interact to affect the development of cancer. Cancer-causing proteins that have already been successfully targeted with drugs tended to have particular ‘social’ characteristics that differ from non-cancer proteins.

Read the full article here: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-us/cancer-news/press-release/2015-12-23-mapping-cancers-social-networks-opens-new-approaches-to-treatment

In an article recently published by PNAS, Shahar Ronen et al. “introduce a metric of a language’s global influence based on its position in the network” of co-spoken languages. They show that the “connectivity of a language in this network … remains a strong predictor of a language’s influence”. In other words the more likely a language is to show up on a polyglot’s resume, the more influential it is. The authors provide a super cool user-friendly web-based visualization tool to explore the data!

Read the full article here: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/52/E5616.abstract

Check out the super cool interactive language mapping tool here: http://language.media.mit.edu/visualizations/books