At its peak, COVID-19 drastically reduced the average human lifespan — by as much as nine years in one U.S. state — according to a new longevity metric developed at UCLA. Sociology professor Patrick Heuveline devised the metric, called the mean unfulfilled lifespan, to assess the impact of temporary “shocks” like the novel coronavirus on average […]

When new mothers complain that all those sleepless nights caring for their newborns are taking years off their life, they just might be right, UCLA research published this summer in the journal Sleep Health suggests. Scientists studied 33 mothers during their pregnancies and the first year of their babies’ lives, analyzing the women’s DNA from blood samples […]

Printable electronics could cause a proliferation of smart, connected devices, from household appliances that can communicate with each other to medical diagnostic sensors that can be placed on the body to forgo invasive procedures. But the variety of printing surfaces poses a challenge, since a method used to print on a flat object may not […]

Currently, much of the thinking around risks posed by volcanoes follows a simple equation: the bigger the likely eruption, the worse it will be for society and human welfare. However, a team of experts now argues that too much focus is on the risks of massive yet rare volcanic explosions, while far too little attention […]

Pancreatic cancer, which affects about 60,000 Americans every year, is one of the deadliest forms of cancer. After diagnosis, fewer than 10 percent of patients survive for five years.  While some chemotherapies are initially effective, pancreatic tumors often become resistant to them. The disease has also proven difficult to treat with newer approaches such as […]

Biological engineers at MIT have devised a new way to efficiently edit bacterial genomes and program memories into bacterial cells by rewriting their DNA. Using this approach, various forms of spatial and temporal information can be permanently stored for generations and retrieved by sequencing the cells’ DNA. The new DNA writing technique, which the researchers […]

Scientists in Australia and in the USA have solved a long-standing mystery about the Sun that could help astronomers predict space weather and help us prepare for potentially devastating geomagnetic storms if they were to hit Earth. The Sun’s internal magnetic field is directly responsible for space weather – streams of high-energy particles from the […]

The Code of Hammurabi. The Magna Carta. The Declaration of Independence. Throughout recorded human history, written records such as these have proclaimed that people deserve freedom, security and dignity. Why, despite huge cultural differences across continents and sweeping societal changes across centuries, have the underlying concepts in these declarations of rights remained largely unchanged? According […]

A major current of the Atlantic Ocean – which acts like a global-scaled conveyor belt and includes the Gulf Stream – may have been losing stability over the last century, research has shown. Niklas Boers, from the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute (GSI), has examined the extent to which the stability of the Atlantic […]

Research on thallium isotope ratios suggests that the true reason up to 90% of the Earth’s species died out around 250 million years ago may be fluctuations in the oceans’ oxygen levels rather than a simple drop in dissolved oxygen. Sediment records have suggested that the end-Permian mass extinction – the largest mass extinction in […]