A new study led by Professor Larry Kramer from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston suggests that the impact of microgravity is far-reaching, potentially causing brain volume changes and pituitary gland deformation.
It’s a rumour that just won’t die. When asked whether the COVID-19 virus was genetically engineered in a lab, scientists have already said “no” rather firmly, but the matter of the new coronavirus’ origin is unlikely to be put to rest so easily.
Hundreds of scientists around the globe are launching studies in search of genes that could explain why some people fall victim to coronavirus infection while others escape relatively unscathed.
The Observer’s science editor looks at questions such as why the disease does appear not to infect children, and whether men are really more susceptible
Silicon chips raise hopes for scaling up devices to millions of quantum bits
One of the great scientific puzzles of our time is why we live in a universe full of matter rather than antimatter. Wherever we look, we observe that matter dominates over antimatter, yet we believe that matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts soon after the Big Bang. To reconcile these two facts there must be some difference in the way matter and antimatter behave.
The Paleoneurobiology Group of the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), led by Emiliano Bruner, has just published a morphological analysis of the brains of Neanderthals and modern humans in the Journal of Human Evolution, whose results suggest that the more rounded shape of modern human brains is due in part to larger and bulgier parietal lobes, on average.
Some types of anyons may eventually be useful for building better quantum computers
In the mid-19th century scientists were diligently at work experimenting with methods to capture the solar spectrum in images. French physicist Edmond Becquerel was the first to succeed. In 1848 he produced what he called “photochromatic images” which are considered to be the world’s first color photographs.
With 400 public health offices forging ahead with testing, the country is a model for others to emulate
