Sequencing DNA from individual cells is changing the way that researchers think of humans as a whole.
Creativity is often part of a mental illness, with writers particularly susceptible, according to a study of more than a million people. Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, the Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute found. They were almost twice as likely as the general…
When we talk of quasars, we think: early universe; angry black holes in the centers of galaxies; gobs of energy; the ancient light of which is used today by astronomers to understand the primordial cosmos and the expansion of space-time. But what if I told you that astronomers have not only discovered a quasar in…
ESA’s Herschel space observatory has discovered enough water vapor to fill Earth’s oceans more than 2000 times over, in a gas and dust cloud that is on the verge of collapsing into a new Sun-like star. Stars form within cold, dark clouds of gas and dust – ‘pre-stellar cores’ – that contain all the ingredients…
Andy Murray’s unexpectedly strong start against Roger Federer in the Wimbledon 2012 final put the Daily Telegraph columnist Matthew Norman in a science-fiction mood. ‘It seemed we’d been transported to one of those parallel universes into which Doctor Who likes to slip with insouciant ease,’ he commented. A year later, that alternative world became reality,…
A devastating hurricane has made it possible to test a rarely observed effect of evolution in the wild for the first time. Scientists transported forest lizards to a group of Caribbean islands stripped bare of vegetation by Hurricane Frances in 2004. They collected pairs of brown anole lizards from a large forested island near Great…
It started with a bang, and has been expanding ever since. For nearly a century, this has been the standard view of the Universe. Now one cosmologist is proposing a radically different interpretation of events — in which the Universe is not expanding at all. In a paper posted on the arXiv preprint server1, Christof…