Baffling chronic pain eases after doses of gut microbes
What Rina Green calls her “living hell” began with an innocuous backache. By late 2022, two years later, pain flooded her entire body daily and could be so intense that she couldn’t get out of…
Science sleuths flag hundreds of papers that use AI without disclosing it
“As of my last knowledge update”, “regenerate response”, “as an AI language model” — these are just a few of the telltale signs of researchers’ use of artificial intelligence (AI) that science-integrity watchers have found…
Ancient DNA reveals Phoenicians’ surprising genetic ancestry
An ancient Middle Eastern civilization that developed an early alphabet spread its culture far and wide — but not its DNA, finds a 23 April Nature study1 of hundreds of ancient human genomes….
How we’re battling Trump’s science cuts across small-town America
Donald Trump’s second term as president of the United States is still less than 100 days old, yet his administration has created an unparalleled cacophony of news in that short space of time…
How aging affects bone cells
You know that feeling that your body is getting more “stiff” or “creaky” with age? Well — it’s not just your imagination. A new study shows that, just like the rest of the…
Infants encode short-lived hippocampal memories
Challenging assumptions about infant memory, a novel functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study shows that babies as young as 12 months old can encode memories, researchers report. The findings suggest that infantile amnesia…
New map of landscape beneath Antarctica unveiled
Known as Bedmap3, it incorporates more than six decades of survey data acquired by planes, satellites, ships and even dog-drawn sleds. The results were published in the journal Scientific Data. The map gives…
Transforming skin cells into neurons for cell therapy.
Anne Trafton | MIT News Converting one type of cell to another — for example, a skin cell to a neuron — can be done through a process that requires the skin cell to be…
The oldest meteorite crater on Earth
We have discovered the oldest meteorite impact crater on Earth, in the very heart of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The crater formed more than 3.5 billion years ago, making it the…
Are our thoughts ‘real’?
Sam Baron, The University of Melbourne You can doubt just about anything. But there’s one thing you can know for sure: you are having thoughts right now. This idea came to characterise the…