It’s been a pretty slow news for science so there are a couple of articles that might not have made the cut in a more fruitful month show up here:

• This morbid but fascinating article from the Smithsonian Magazine talks about a rather obvious conclusion, that human sacrificial rituals in many cultures, far from being motivated by religious belief, was a tool to terrorize the masses and ensure continued stratification between the different social classes that comprise their societies. The claim is that statistical methods is used to find out the patterns, a technique that I’m always dubious about, but the effects seem reasonable enough: societies which practice human sacrifice are unlikely to progress to a stage in which everyone was socially equal.
• The next one is the link to the Harvard paper itself rather than any article covering it. It has been fashionable in recent years to blame the upsurge in crime in the 1980s to exposure of children to lead. This paper takes this further and examines the relationship between homicide rates in American cities between 1921 and 1936 and the construction of water systems using lead pipes. This paper confirms that finding, concluding that cities that had used lead in their pipes had homicide rates that were 24 percent higher than those cities that did not.
• Then we have an economics paper about how publicly-traded companies have indeed been in decline in the US. Even more worryingly, it found that the decline of publicly-traded companies was not matched by an increase in private firms, suggesting that companies are being successful in stiffing competition and that they are enjoying correspondingly higher profit margins as a result.
• Finally the most incredibly science news all month is how a homeowner in England accidentally uncovered an elaborate Roman villa in his backyard. Experts examining the find have concluded that it was built between 175 and 220 AD and has not been touched since it collapsed 1,400 years ago. Its excellent state, large size and the high quality of the artifacts found in the villa, makes it probably the most important archaeological discovery of the year.