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Huge Study Finds Blood Proteins That Could Increase Risk of Severe COVID

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Multiple factors play a role in complex diseases like COVID, and knowing what they are is important for predicting how different people will be affected. Early on in the pandemic, being older, overweight, or smoking were identified as increasing your risk of developing severe COVID. This then informed public health decisions – the elderly were … Read more

Orcas: Fossil hints that killing whales is a recent adaptation

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A 1.4-million-year-old fossil relative of killer whales had teeth that suggest it ate small fish rather than large marine mammals Life 7 March 2022 By Christa Lesté-Lasserre Artistic reconstruction of Rododelphis stamatiadisi Rossella Faleni A 1.4-million-year-old ancestor of orcas and false killer whales seems to have dined on small fish – which suggests its descendants … Read more

A Single Genetic Test Can Accurately Diagnose 25 Rare Diseases Faster Than Ever

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Scientists have developed a quick genetic test that can diagnose a large range of rare muscle and nerve diseases with near perfect accuracy. Tandem repeat disorders are a family of over 50 inherited diseases, including Huntington’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), that seem to occur when short DNA sequences are repeated too many times. … Read more

Brain cells: Special neurons may signal when to start new memories

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Recordings from electrodes in people’s brains reveal that certain neurons in the hippocampus show a burst of activity to mark the boundary between different events Mind 7 March 2022 , updated 7 March 2022 By Clare Wilson Illustration of neurons in the hippocampus KATERYNA KON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY A newly discovered kind of brain cell involved … Read more

Amazon rainforest nears tipping point that may see it become savannah

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More than three-quarters of the world’s largest rainforest has become less resilient to drought since the early 2000s, with areas near humans and with lower rainfall being the worst hit Environment 7 March 2022 By Adam Vaughan An area deforested for gold mining, along the Interoceanic highway linking Peru and Brazil in the Amazon region … Read more

IQ of over half of the US population may have been lowered by leaded petrol

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Exposure to leaded petrol as a child has been linked to an average IQ drop of 2.6 points among US adults, increasing to 5.9 points among those born in the mid-to-late 1960s Health 7 March 2022 By Clare Wilson Fumes from cars using leaded petrol may affect IQ PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy More than half of … Read more

Spiders Caught Hunting in Giant Synchronized Swarms, And Now We Know How

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Pack hunting spiders exist in places other than your nightmares. While most spiders enjoy solitary lives, 20 of the roughly 50,000 known spider species live in colonies. One species, Anelosimus eximius, lives in extremely large colonies of up to 1,000 individual spiders that work together to build webs spanning several meters.   When prey falls into their … Read more

Parthenogenesis: Fatherless mouse pups develop from unfertilised eggs with gene editing

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Parthenogenesis, the development of offspring from unfertilised eggs, was thought to be impossible in mammals, but researchers have used genetic trickery to make it happen Life 7 March 2022 By Alex Wilkins An adult mouse that developed from an unfertilised egg, and her pups YANCHANG WEI A genetically manipulated mouse pup born from an unfertilised egg … Read more

Domestication: Geese may have been the first birds kept by humans 7000 years ago

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Goose bones from Stone Age China suggest the birds were being domesticated there 7000 years ago, which could mean they were domesticated before chickens Humans 7 March 2022 By Michael Marshall Chinese geese (Anser cygnoides f. domestica) blickwinkel/AGAMI/M. Guyt/Alamy Geese may have been domesticated as early as 7000 years ago in what is now China, … Read more

Spiders that hunt in groups synchronise their movement to catch prey

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Some spider species that live in groups of thousands on enormous webs synchronise their movements to catch insects up to 700 times heavier than an individual spider Life 7 March 2022 By Christa Lesté-Lasserre Some spider species hunt in packs, moving as one to catch their prey Spiders that hunt in packs use web vibrations … Read more