Tag Archives: Research

Women’s brains are superior to men’s in at least in one respect — they age more slowly. And now, a group of researchers reports that they have found a gene in mice that rejuvenates female brains. Humans have the same gene. The discovery suggests a possible way to help both women and men avoid cognitive declines in advanced age. The …

Postpartum depression affects about one in every seven women who give birth, but little is known about what happens in the brains of pregnant women who experience it. A new study begins to shed some light. Researchers scanned the brains of dozens of women in the weeks before and after childbirth and found that two brain areas involved in the …

Humans, unlike most other species, have a knack for making tools. Six million years ago, our apelike ancestors probably smashed nuts with rocks or caught termites with sticks. Around 3.3 million years ago, hominins began using flakes of stone, perhaps to cut flesh from carcasses or chop plants. And by 1.5 million years ago, they were using more sophisticated tools …

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University health economist who came to prominence crusading against lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic, faced questioning from the Senate health committee on Wednesday morning as President Trump’s nominee to direct the National Institutes of Health. The agency, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, with a $48 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers, …

For 30 miles we bounce along a dirt road in southwestern Wyoming, heading toward a jagged skyline. It’s early September and the aspens are starting to turn yellow. As we climb toward the mountains, the air grows colder. Soon the road will see snowfall. Jeff Munroe, a professor of geology at Middlebury College in Vermont, is taking us back in …

In May 2023, Matteo Santon was filming cuttlefish in the shallow-water reefs around Indonesia. A marine visual ecologist at Bristol University in England, he planned to document the predators’ approach to hunting from the perspective of the prey — essentially, to see what it’s like to be the crab. He was hoping to see a particular hypnotic camouflage display cuttlefish …

Imagine you are video chatting with a distant friend who is eating lunch, and your pal’s sandwich looks delicious. What if you could ask your friend to dip a sensor into the meal, and give you a taste? Remote snacking has moved a bit closer to virtual reality. In a paper on Friday in the journal Science Advances, Yizhen Jia, …

Tea leaves pull heavy metals from water, significantly lowering the amount of lead and other dangerous compounds that people may be unknowingly drinking, a new study found. Recent research has highlighted potential applications for used tea leaves, from biofuels to gluten-free cookies. But the new study shows a public health benefit from something that countless people are already doing. About …

The moon is not bone dry, scientists now know. But how many drops of water will thirsty astronauts find? No one knows for sure. A robotic NASA spacecraft called Lunar Trailblazer, which launched Wednesday night from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is aiming to provide a detailed map from orbit of the abundance, distribution and form of water across the …

For generations, scientists looked to the East African savanna as the birthplace of our species. But recently some researchers have put forward a different history: Homo sapiens evolved across the entire continent over the past several hundred thousand years. If this Africa-wide theory were true, then early humans must have figured out how to live in many environments beyond grasslands. …