Category: General

Sign up for a full digest of all the best opinions of the week in our Voices Dispatches email Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter Urban foxes may be bolder than their country cousins but city life has not made them cleverer, according to researchers who set puzzles for dozens of the animals.…

Sign up for a full digest of all the best opinions of the week in our Voices Dispatches email Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter Researchers have uncovered a potential route to developing the first ever drug treatments for the second most common type of dementia. The study has shed light on how…

Science has long accepted that people are affected by their social environment – a term researchers use to describe day-to-day surroundings, interactions and stresses. For example, people with money, a robust social life and access to safe outdoor spaces are often going to have better long-term health outcomes than those without. Our four-legged friends, whose…

The divine blend of spices needed to make curry first reached Southeast Asia about 2,000 years ago, when the region began trading with the Indian subcontinent, according to an analysis of ancient spice residue. The new project analyzed 12 different spice grinding tools unearthed at the ancient trading port of Oc Eo, in modern-day Vietnam,…

A state-of-the-art vaccine research facility, where scientists will work to ensure future pandemics are stopped in their tracks, has been unveiled by the Government. The Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre (VDEC) is based at the UK Health and Security Agency (UKHSA) science and defence technology campus Porton Down, near Salisbury. Live viruses will be kept…

With forty wild feline species scattered across the globe, cats boast an array of adaptations that allow them to thrive in some of Earth’s harshest environments. Here, we marvel at some of the extremes of the cat world – smallest, fluffiest and more – and see what evolution has done with these magnificent mammals. 1.…

Next, Parker wondered how general this effect is. Most antipsychotics developed over the past 70 years stick to dopamine receptors, but a new generation binds to other sites, like acetylcholine receptors. Might these new drugs still be doing something to D1 neurons indirectly? Parker’s team picked three promising new drugs—all in the final clinical trials…

Internal dissent within the mostly volunteer disease-news network known as ProMED—which alerted the world to the earliest cases of Covid, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and SARS—has broken out into the open and threatens to take down the internationally treasured network unless an external sponsor can be found. The struggle for the future of the…

An international team of scientists has described an ancient human fossil in China unlike any other hominin found before. It resembles neither the lineage that split to form Neanderthals, nor Denisovans, nor us, suggesting our current version of the human family tree needs another branch. The jaw, skull, and leg bones belonging to this yet-to-be…