Tag Archives: Research

Chimpanzees live only in African rainforests and woodlands. Orangutans live only in the jungles of Indonesia. But humans live pretty much everywhere. Our species has spread across frozen tundras, settled on mountaintops and called other extreme environments home. Scientists have historically seen this adaptability as one of the hallmarks of modern humans and a sign of how much our brains …

Chimpanzees live only in African rainforests and woodlands. Orangutans live only in the jungles of Indonesia. But humans live pretty much everywhere. Our species has spread across frozen tundras, settled on mountaintops and called other extreme environments home. Scientists have historically seen this adaptability as one of the hallmarks of modern humans and a sign of how much our brains …

A tantalizing vision of a women-centric society has emerged from an ancient cemetery in the bucolic countryside of southwest England. Whereas women commonly left home to join their husbands’ families upon marriage, the Durotriges, a Celtic tribe that lived in Dorset 2,000 years ago, bucked the mold with a system called matrilocality, wherein women remained in their ancestral communities and …

The number of Americans receiving psychotherapy increased by 30 percent during the pandemic, as virtual sessions replaced in-person appointments — but new research dampens the hope that technology will make mental health care more available to the neediest populations. In fact, the researchers found, the shift to teletherapy has exacerbated existing disparities. The increase in psychotherapy has occurred among groups …

Obesity should be assessed in a way that goes beyond the standard measure of body mass index, or B.M.I., according to a new definition of the condition released by an international commission. Its report, published Tuesday in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal, makes the case for focusing on how much body fat and what medical complications the person has, …

Deaths from bombs and other traumatic injuries during the first nine months of the war in Gaza may have been underestimated by more than 40 percent, according to a new analysis published in The Lancet. The peer-reviewed statistical analysis, led by epidemiologists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, used modeling in an effort to provide an objective …

A culture flourished along the central Peruvian coast from about A.D. 900 to 1500. Called the Chancay, they left behind a wealth of cultural remains, including intricate tattoos that are preserved to this day on the skin of mummified individuals. New details of these tattoos that were previously hidden to the naked eye, including finely traced lines, were described in …

The number of people in the United States who develop dementia each year will double over the next 35 years to about one million annually by 2060, a new study estimates, and the number of new cases per year among Black Americans will triple. The increase will primarily be due to the growing aging population, as many Americans are living …

Most of us don’t think about pain until we have it. And when we do, it’s typically something we get over after a few days or weeks. That was my own experience, until the summer of 2023. One day I woke to find that my arms hurt. There was no obvious explanation, nothing I’d done. The pain was intense. I …

J. Fraser Stoddart, a Scottish-born scientist who went from playing with construction sets as a boy to building molecular machines a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, known as nanomachines, for which he shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, died on Dec. 30 in Melbourne, Australia. He was 82. Alison Margaret Stoddart, his daughter, said …