A widely accepted theory of Native American origins coming from Japan has been attacked in a new scientific study, which shows that the genetics and skeletal biology “simply does not match-up”. The findings, published today in the peer-reviewed journal PaleoAmerica, are likely to have a major impact on how we understand Indigenous Americans’ arrival to […]

Becoming a parent later in life could have beneficial effects for your offspring – in roundworms at least – according to new research from the University of East Anglia. A new study published today shows how the age of parents affects offspring over several generations in roundworms (Caenorhabditis elegans). It finds that the offspring of […]

Assembly theory – an approach that characterises molecular complexity – has been used by scientists in the UK to investigate how selection emerges in chemistry. The method offers new possibilities for making compounds with desired properties in a minimum number of steps based on evolution. ‘By using assembly theory to follow a given path of, […]

Readers who have been around here for a long time will know that for several years I was editor in chief of On Giants’ Shoulders the monthly history of science blog carnival. They will also know that I buried it when its time had come and replaced it with Whewell’s Gazette Your weekly digest of all the best of […]

How do you write a biography of an intellectual woman, who was a major, significant figure in the scientific, social, and political circles of her time, but who, although she wrote extensively, published almost nothing and whose personal papers were scattered following her death and have over time mostly disappeared, leaving only faint traces of […]

Improved climate modelling can predict fish stocks in the North Atlantic, as well as warming effects across the Northern hemisphere, for instance in Europe and North America. Fragile and exposed to climate change, the Arctic is warming three times faster than the rest of the planet. As the frozen ground melts, carbon dioxide and methane […]

Today’s world is one big maze, connected by layers of concrete and asphalt that afford us the luxury of navigation by vehicle. For many of our road-related advancements — GPS lets us fire fewer neurons thanks to map apps, cameras alert us to potentially costly scrapes and scratches, and electric autonomous cars have lower fuel […]

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT, has received the 2021 Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award from the Max Planck Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for his work on two-dimensional quantum materials. In 2018, Jarillo-Herrero’s research group discovered that by rotating two layers of graphene by a “magic angle,” […]

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended the first ever malaria vaccine for widespread use in children. Malaria causes more than 260,000 deaths in children aged under five in Africa every year. This GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) RTS,S/AS01 (Mosquirix) vaccine prevents 39% of malaria cases and 30% of severe malaria cases in young children. It is recommended for […]

For the first time, scientists have imaged and measured a fundamental but fleeting step in water ionisation – the creation of the hydroxyl–hydronium complex OH(H3O+), a radical–cation pair – before it separates a hundred quadrillionth of a second later. Water ionisation is a process that features in countless chemical reactions, with key roles in everything […]