For 50 years, interplanetary probes have returned thousands of striking images of the surface of Mars, but never a single sound. Now, NASA’s Perseverance mission has put an end to this deafening silence by recording the first ever Martian sounds. The scientific team1 for the French-US SuperCam2 instrument installed on Perseverance was convinced that the study of […]

For 25 years, UC Berkeley biologist Robert Dudley has been intrigued by humans’ love of alcohol. In 2014, he wrote a book proposing that our attraction to booze arose millions of years ago, when our ape and monkey ancestors discovered that the scent of alcohol led them to ripe, fermenting and nutritious fruit. A new study now supports this […]

Scientists at Northwestern Medicine are using new advances in CRISPR gene-editing technology to uncover new biology that could lead to longer-lasting treatments and new therapeutic strategies for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). The HIV epidemic has been overlooked during the COVID-19 pandemic but represents a critical and ongoing threat to human health with an estimated 1.5 […]

Gender-affirming facial surgery (GFS) is pursued by transgender individuals who desire facial features that better reflect their gender identity. Until now, there have been few objective guidelines to justify and facilitate effective surgical decision-making for gender-affirming facial surgery. In order to validate surgical decisions for GFS, researchers from the UC San Francisco and the University […]

Imagine the brain as a giant switchboard covered with thousands of buttons, knobs, dials and levers that control aspects of our thought, emotions, behavior, and memory. (You can think of the movie Inside Out, if you like). For more than a century, neuroscientists have been methodically flipping these switches on and off, alone or in combination, […]

Carbon copied cornlines up to fill the shelves,a litany of yellowmangled intonauseating rainbowsof our globalised excess.Colours of artifice,carefully arrangedto catch the eye:hydrogenation,moulding,dyes,stabilising,flavours,lies.Nutrients torn from the cob,leaving open woundsfilled with greenbacksacross a landthat could have lastedforever. A selection of ultra-processed foods that now make up our globalised diet (Image Credit: Nico Smit/ Unsplash). This poem is […]

Stanford researchers have developed an algorithm that may help discern if someone has autism by looking at brain scans. The novel algorithm, driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), also successfully predicts the severity of autism symptoms in individual patients. With further honing, the algorithm could lead to earlier diagnoses, more targeted therapies, and […]

While potentially crucial to preventing the spread of COVID-19, lockdowns are associated with increased rates of depression and anxiety as well as food insecurity among women in India and other parts of the developing world, according to a new research. The study from the University of California San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy finds that […]

Before menopause, women are typically protected from metabolic problems that may lead to weight gain, when compared to age-matched men. However, after menopause, this benefit seems to disappear. Researchers around the world agree that the female hormone estrogen is one important player in this benefit. At Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Yong Xu, professor of pediatrics – nutrition […]

Scientists have published the first complete, gapless sequence of a human genome, two decades after the Human Genome Project produced the first draft human genome sequence. According to researchers, having a complete, gap-free sequence of the roughly 3 billion bases (or “letters”) in our DNA is critical for understanding the full spectrum of human genomic variation […]