News Articles

The earliest known record of the genus Homo dates to between 2.8 and 2.75 million years ago, according to an international team.

From light-up shoes to smart watches, wearable electronics are gaining traction among consumers, but these gadgets' versatility is still held back by the stiff, short-lived batteries that are required. These limitations, however, could soon be overcome. In the journal ACS Nano, scientists report the first durable, flexible cloth that harnesses human motion to generate energy. It can also self-charge batteries or supercapacitors without an external power source and make new commercial and medical applications possible.

Because of the broad nature of autism spectrum disorder and even broader range of autism traits, any number of genetic and environmental influences are associated with risk of it.Twins studies are valuable in science because at least some of the factors are quantifiable. Though many papers claim  genetic influences on the risk of autism and the fuzzy related traits diagnosis, they are drawn from samples of individuals which may miss people with more subtle manifestations and may not represent the broader population. A new paper using UK twins seeks to rectify that.

A review of 31 years of narcissism research using data from more than 475,000 participants finds that men, on average, are more narcissistic than women. Or at least they scored higher in narcissism across multiple generations and regardless of age. Psychology is overwhelmingly dominated by women so it's difficult to know what bias that may introduce into testing - and there is a difference between clinical narcissism and colloquial narcissism, which was not controlled for in the analysis.The scholars examined more than 355 journal articles, dissertations, manuscripts and technical manuals, and studied gender differences in the three aspects of narcissism: leadership/authority, grandiose/exhibitionism and entitlement.  

We have two eyes and each differ in their optical properties - you can easily tell by placing a hand over each and seeing the difference. As a result of the fits and starts and do-overs in evolution that got us eyes, our vision system results in a blur projected in each retina and then the visual system calibrates itself to give us a clear picture. In the past, researchers had people where glasses where images were upside down. Eventually, our brains compensated and the images were correct - until people took off the glasses. 

Medical marijuana usage has been proliferating across the United States, primarily due to claims about pain management, but the demographics are baffling. Though women have 60 percent of medical visits for pain, 80 percent of medical marijuana prescriptions for pain have been men. Yet in instances where the prescriptions have been real, tolerance develops quickly, which means people are inhaling more and more carcinogens, and there are numerous other side effects. 

The concept of randomness has intrigued great minds for as long as history of great thinkers has been recorded.  From the nature of wind to drunks running into lampposts on their way home, scholars have been intrigued with making random predictable. A group of chemists say they have challenged traditional interpretations of randomness by computationally generating random and mechanically rigid arrangements of two-dimensional hard disks, think pennies with no thickness, for the first time.

Researchers say they have clear and detailed evidence of the inequitable delivery of mental health care services for disadvantaged Australians. Introduced in 1975, Australia's national health insurance scheme Medicare (originally Medibank) was envisioned to deliver the most equitable and efficient means of providing health insurance coverage for all Australians.

For almost a century, scientists have been puzzled by a process that is crucial to much of the life in Earth's oceans: Why does calcium carbonate, the tough material of seashells and corals, sometimes take the form of calcite, and at other times form a chemically identical form of the mineral, called aragonite, that is more soluble -- and therefore more vulnerable to ocean acidification?

High up in the high Andes mountains of Argentina, a population has adapted to tolerate the toxic chemical arsenic. For thousands of years, in some regions of the Andes, people have been exposed to high levels of it, because arsenic in volcanic bedrock is released into the groundwater. How could this population adapt to tolerate arsenic, a potent killer of such ill repute that it's often the overused plot-driver of many murder mysteries? 

How much overdetection is acceptable in cancer screening? A UK survey discussed in The BMJ this week affirms what we always knew, that responses are all over the map, depending on how the questions are framed. The article is part of a series on over-detection (over-diagnosis) looking at the risks and harms to patients of expanding definitions of disease and increasing use of new diagnostic technologies. Over-detection describes cancerous lesions that are picked up and treated but would never have caused symptoms or become fatal in a person's lifetime. This is typically seen if the cancers are so slow growing that they would not have been detected if screening had not taken place.

Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) at Brookhaven National Laboratory only achieved first light a few weeks ago and already collaborators at the X-Ray Powder Diffraction (XPD) beamline have tested a setup that yielded data on thermoelectric materials. The work was part of the commissioning activities for the XPD beamline, a process that fine-tunes the settings of beamline equipment to ready the facility for first scientific commissioning experiments in mid-March on its way to full user operations later in the year.