October 15, 2025 3 min read Men’s Brains Shrink Faster than Women’s. What That Means for Alzheimer’s Women’s brains age more slowly than men’s, but they still have higher rates of Alzheimer’s disease By Rachel Fieldhouse & Nature magazine A healthy brain (left) and a brain affected by Alzheimer’s disease. TheVisualMD/Science Source During ageing, men…
Illustration of the Triassic dinosaur Huayracursor jaguensis Jorge Blanco. High in the Argentinian Andes, a team of palaeontologists has found a small dinosaur fossil with the first hints of the extended neck that distinguishes sauropod dinosaurs like Diplodocus. Named Huayracursor jaguensis, the fossil is a partial skeleton from a dinosaur that lived in the Triassic…
Newly discovered African fossils lend a hand to suspicions that an ancient hominid outside our own genus, Homo, made and used stone and bone tools. Partial remains of a roughly 1.5-million-year-old Paranthropus boisei individual, including hand and wrist bones, indicate that this extinct hominid species could have made basic cutting and pounding implements, say paleoanthropologist…
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Lung cancer is the deadliest cancer among women in the United States, surpassing the mortality numbers of breast and ovarian cancer combined. And surprisingly, younger women who have never smoked are increasingly being diagnosed with the disease. Here to explain what could be driving this…
I am standing in the bathroom with a strip of litmus paper in my hand. I am going to pee on it and hope that it doesn’t turn red, which would indicate acid. This isn’t for a bet – it is a (ahem) litmus test of whether my diet is slowly killing me. Acidic urine…
October 14, 2025 3 min read November 2025: Science History from 50, 100 and 150 Years Ago Curveballs; poison wallpaper By Mark Fischetti 1975, Pupil Perception: “Photographs of two women were retouched so that each woman had large pupils in one photograph and small pupils in the other. Male subjects were shown eight different pairs…
The skeleton of a woman cradling a baby in her left arm, buried at an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Scremby, UK Dr Hugh Willmott, University of Sheffield Scientists are homing in on a pregnancy test for women who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago. For the first time, researchers have detected levels of oestrogen,…
October 14, 2025 3 min read New DNA Search Engine Brings Order to Biology’s Big Data MetaGraph compresses vast data archives into a search engine for scientists, opening up new frontiers of biological discovery By Elie Dolgin & Nature magazine The Internet has Google. Now biology has MetaGraph. Detailed today in Nature, the search engine…
Deep within a particle accelerator, theoretical physicist Giorgio Angelotti is hard at work. He sets a black cylinder on a mount, bolts it down, then runs through some safety checks before retreating from the chamber, known as “the hatch”. “You have to be sure there’s no one in the hatch before you close the door,”…
Produced with financial support from Vertex Pharmaceuticals. This video is part of an editorially independent special report. Narrator: Have you ever thought about how your body turns food into energy or just how carefully it has to manage that process? When we eat, the glucose from our food gets stored in the liver as glycogen….
