Tag Archives: ScienceAlert

The special brains of spiders may have started to evolve in the oceans, long before their ancestors crawled onto land. A fresh look at a 500-million-year-old fossil by researchers from the University of Arizona and Lycoming College in the US and King’s College London has revealed remarkable similarities between the brains of extinct marine arthropods and modern-day arachnids. The discovery …

Most of us want to enjoy later life feeling strong, connected, and mentally sharp. But how often do we stop to think about whether the things we’re doing right now are helping us get there? A new quiz – which we have developed as part of the Take Five to Age Well project, a free, expert-led, month-long challenge from The …

Nuclear waste left over from US efforts to develop an atomic bomb from the 1940s and onwards put children living near St Louis, Missouri at a significantly elevated risk of cancer throughout the rest of their lives, a new study suggests. As part of the top-secret scheme known as the Manhattan Project, radioactive waste from uranium refinement in St Louis …

When the JWST began science observations in July 2022, it flung open a whole new window on the Universe. The JWST looked further back in time than any other telescope, and it revealed several surprises. One of them was the Little Red Dots (LRD); ancient, faint objects that the powerful space telescope detected as far back as only 600 million …

The hypertension drug rilmenidine has been shown to slow down aging in worms, an effect that in humans could hypothetically help us live longer and keep us healthier in our latter years. Previous research has shown rilmenidine mimics the effects of caloric restriction on a cellular level. Reducing available energy while maintaining nutrition within the body has been shown to …

A case that first appeared in a medical journal several years ago has recently resurfaced in the media, highlighting an unexpected risk of hormone therapies: a baby girl in Sweden developed unusually large genitals after lying on her father’s bare chest, accidentally exposed to his testosterone gel. The incident is a reminder that hormone treatments, while safe when used correctly, …

Dogs really can be trained to smell Parkinson’s disease, according to new research from the United Kingdom. In a double blind trial, a Golden Retriever and a Labrador were able to sniff out which skin swabs came from people with Parkinson’s. The smell of the oily secretions seemed to hold secret clues. “The dogs in this study achieved high sensitivity …

Found in everything from protein bars to energy drinks, erythritol has long been considered a safe alternative to sugar. But new research suggests this widely used sweetener may be quietly undermining one of the body’s most crucial protective barriers – with potentially serious consequences for heart health and stroke risk. A recent study from the University of Colorado suggests erythritol …

Dopamine is one of the most extensively studied chemical messengers in the human brain, and yet scientists are still figuring out how it works to accomplish so much. For years, the classic view has been that, when released, dopamine slowly diffuses through the brain like a chemical megaphone, broadcasting information far and wide to numerous target cells. Recently, however, that …

The rate at which our bodies age and wear down doesn’t necessarily match our actual age, and the differences can help predict lifespan and disease risk. Now, researchers have developed a new tool for assessing biological age from a single brain scan taken halfway through our lives. The tool, put together by an international team of scientists, is based on …