Chemical analysis of sewage in 10 countries over Christmas and new year 2020–21 has shown how new psychoactive substances have spread across the world. One designer drug, the mephedrone analogue 3-methylmethcathinone, was found for the first time in New Zealand, having previously only been reported in Europe and North America. Over the last two decades, […]

A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a chocolate chip cookie labeled “consumer complaint” won’t taste as good as the exact same product described as “new and improved,” a new study suggests. Researchers labeled identical saltine crackers and chocolate chip cookies as either “new and improved,” “factory typical” or “consumer complaint” […]

Although tropical forest ecosystems around the world have been modified and fragmented by agroforests planted to produce commodities such as coffee, rubber and areca palm, amphibian communities can survive in those transformed landscapes — if the agroforests are managed to support biodiversity. That’s the conclusion of a new study led by Penn State wildlife ecologists […]

An unprecedented new telescope image of the Milky Way galaxy’s turbulent center has revealed nearly 1,000 mysterious strands, inexplicably dangling in space. Stretching up to 150 light years long, the one-dimensional strands (or filaments) are found in pairs and clusters, often stacked equally spaced, side by side like strings on a harp. Using observations at […]

Martin Shkreli has been banned from working in the pharmaceutical industry for life. The former chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals (now known as Vyera Pharmaceuticals) has also been ordered to pay back almost $65 million (£48 million) in profits, in a competition lawsuit brought by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and seven states. In […]

Horses have been intrinsically entwined with human history for the past five millennia, acting as an early means of rapid transport and playing a key part in agriculture, warfare and sport. Despite this, major decades-long mysteries have surrounded where and how modern horses were first domesticated. Yet a large international team of zooarchaeologists, historians and […]

Early on in this series I mentioned that a lot of the scientific developments that took place during the Renaissance were the result of practical developments entering the excessively theoretical world of the university disciplines. This was very much the case in the mathematical sciences, where the standard English expression for the Renaissance mathematicus is […]

Mentorship has played a central role in the twists and turns of Associate Professor Areg Danagoulian’s life. As a boy, it led him first to mathematics, where a passionate teacher and mentorship from his parents instilled in him a love for the subject. He then followed in the footsteps of his physicist parents and became […]

It could hardly be more complicated: tiny particles whir around wildly with extremely high energy, countless interactions occur in the tangled mess of quantum particles, and this results in a state of matter known as “quark-gluon plasma.” Immediately after the Big Bang, the entire universe was in this state; today it is produced by high-energy […]

An international research team has established a link between gut microbiota and chronic inflammatory diseases such as arthritis. The team led by Éric Boilard of Université Laval has discovered that a protein naturally present in the gut acts on the microbiota and causes the formation of molecules that exacerbate the symptoms of these diseases. The […]