Category: 7. SciTech

The most popular idea for what causes depression in the brain is some kind of chemical imbalance. Many pharmaceutical companies have claimed in their advertising that their antidepressant drugs work by correcting this imbalance. The notion has even been popular with some mental health…

Our bodies are always moving, even when we don’t realize it. We churn through a solar system on a wobbly planet, stand upon shifting tectonic plates, and rise and fall and toss and turn all day and night in a symphony of autonomic and somatic functions. Dizzying though this may seem, life…

If you think this sounds familiar, you’re not wrong. When Trump assumed the presidency in 2017, scientists, archivists, and librarians at the University of Pennsylvania raced to save data published by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and NOAA. Another group in Michigan, also fearing…

A surprising discovery in the feathers of a fossil vulture from central Italy has revealed that volcanic deposits can preserve delicate tissue structures in unprecedented detail, offering new insights into the fossilisation process.

In 1889 in the foothills of Mount Tuscolo, 25km south-east…

That’s what DESI was designed to do: take precise measurements of the apparent size of these bubbles (both near and far) by determining the distances to galaxies and quasars over 11 billion years. That data can then be sliced into chunks to determine how fast the universe was expanding at each…

When French scientists Laurence Gaume and Marion Desquilbet first heard the news about a new international insect decline database, they felt something was off. It suggested that some insect species were actually on the rise – a claim that contradicted years of research.

So, they called each…

None of us remember being babies. In fact, most adults’ earliest memories come from the age of about four years old – and scientists don’t really know why. 

Researchers have long believed this phenomenon – called ‘infantile amnesia’ – was because very young children didn’t form…

Picture the scene. Camden’s Electric Ballroom, circa 1976. The Sex Pistols are on stage, belting out ‘Anarchy in the UK’ to a pogoing mosh pit full of spiky-haired punks. The floor is sticky with lager, the air weighs heavy with attitude. And in the midst of it all, blending in perfectly,…

Hair can be curly, straight, thick, thin, brown, black, blonde, or auburn. It can be long or short, frizzy or lush. While the huge diversity in our genes and environments makes it a no-brainer that hair varies so much, it makes less sense that all these hair types can be present on one…

Good news for fans of the humble pecan: these tasty nuts might be even healthier than we thought, and swapping your usual snacks for them could be a smart move for your health.

That’s because a recent study has found that swapping daily snack foods for pecans can lead to improved cholesterol…