An effective and less expensive tool for the inspection of food and drugs could soon be a reality. Scientists from the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin have been working with national and international partners to develop a conceptually new source of terahertz radiation. The innovation makes it much easier to generate this radiation, which is well suited to the analysis of soft materials and could therefore be more widely used in the food and pharmaceutical industry in future.

A new paper in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology reviewed all mammal species known from the end of the Cretaceous period in North America and found that over 93 percent became extinct across the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, due to the same asteroid that killed the dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago.

That's significantly more than previously thought - but mammals also recovered far more quickly than previously though.  

Celiac disease is a rare immune-based condition brought on by the consumption of gluten in genetically susceptible patients. In recent years a larger number of people have stated they are gluten sensitive or even celiac despite lack of a diagnosis, and many dismissed that as the nocebo effect - people who give up something harmless and feel better, the opposite of people who take something harmless and feel better, a placebo. They argued that people who were embracing it because of pop culture books on wheat.

In the 1950s, thalidomide (Contergan) was prescribed as a sedative drug to pregnant women, resulting in a great number of infants with serious malformations. Up to now, the reasons for these disastrous birth defects have remained unclear. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have at last identified the molecular mechanism of thalidomide. Their findings are highly relevant to current cancer therapies, as related substances are essential components of modern cancer treatment regimens.

Women who commit deadly violence are different in many ways from male perpetrators, both in terms of the most common victims, the way in which the murder is committed, the place where it is carried out and the perpetrator's background. This is shown by a new study that also investigated homicide trends over time in Sweden.

Sweden is in the group of countries with the lowest number of murders per capita. As in other parts of the world, the majority of cases of deadly violence are committed by men: In nine cases out of ten, the perpetrator is a man.

It is also men that have been the main focus of studies in this area. We know less about the characteristics of women who commit deadly violence, because they have been the subject of far fewer studies.

Giant Ice Age species including elephant-sized sloths and powerful saber-toothed cats that once roamed the windswept plains of Patagonia, southern South America, were finally felled by a perfect storm of a rapidly warming climate and humans, according to a paper in Science Advances.

The timing and cause of rapid extinctions of the megafauna has remained a mystery for centuries.

The work led by the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) at the University of Adelaide, says that it was only when the climate warmed, long after humans first arrived in Patagonia, did the megafauna suddenly die off around 12,300 years ago, after the last Ice Age intermission.