People in Britain, from Scotland to Wales, may maintain a cultural identity, but how much of it is real versus an arbitrary social construct? How much should be decided by genes versus how people choose to identify?

A new study opens up as many questions as it answers about Bronze Age Britain. Where did many of them 'come from'? Inference suggests France.

As Peru's Wari kingdom sought to shore up their crumbling empire over 1,000 years ago they did it with their own form of bread and circuses - cocaine, ayahuasca, and a beer with psychedelics mixed in.

Since the concoction was only made by elites without a penalty of death, festivals became a way to exercise political control among friends and challengers alike. It obviously didn't work forever, the Incas conquered them, but the archaeological evidence provides a compelling look into South American culture of 1000 AD.

Do amputee sprinters using running prostheses, or blades, have a competitive advantage?

The world’s fastest 400-meter sprinter, Blake Leeper, was ruled ineligible to compete in the Tokyo Olympics due to having an assumed advantage, but a new study with the most comprehensive set of data ever collected from elite runners with bilateral leg amputations compared performance data from Leeper, South African “blade runner” Oscar Pistorius and other bilateral amputee sprinters with those of the best non-amputee sprinters in the world across five performance metrics and found no advantage.

A survey of over 1,000 mothers who were part of the Understanding Parental Estrangement Survey conducted by the University of Wisconsin Survey Center in 2019 and estranged from their adult children revealed a disconnect between what the kids might say is the reason and parents believe. 

Early-onset scoliosis is a potentially deadly curve in the spine that can damage a child’s heart and lung function as it progresses. Adolescents with scoliosis are traditionally treated with a single spinal fusion, where rods and screws are inserted to fuse the spine in a straighter position.

Parents want to make informed choices and a new study finds that preadolescent children with severe neuromuscular scoliosis who are treated with growth-friendly surgery prior to spinal fusion have more complications and unplanned subsequent surgeries than those who only have the spinal fusion.

It is well-known that the gravity from the moon impacts ocean tides, sailors knew it long before anyone knew what gravity even was. 

A new literature review and small meta-analysis hopes to add to the body of work showing how much gravity impacts plants and animals as well. The meta-analysis was of three previously published cases in which gravitational causality was not fully explored: the swimming activity of isopods, small shell-less crustaceans whose appearance on Earth dates from at least 300 million years ago; reproductive effort in coral; and growth modulation in sunflower seedlings inferred from autoluminescence.