For The Better

Young children’s ability to laugh and make jokes has been mapped by age for the first time using data from a new study involving nearly 700 children from birth to 4 years of age, from around the world. The findings identify the earliest age humor emerg…

A team of researchers has demonstrated for the first time one way that a small molecule turns a single cell into something as large as a tree. For half a century, scientists have known that all plants depend on this molecule, auxin, to grow. Until now,…

In the human brain, the hormone insulin also acts on the most important neurotransmitter for the reward system, dopamine. Insulin lowers the dopamine level in a specific region of the brain (striatum) that regulates reward processes and cognitive funct…

Global change is eroding life on earth at an unprecedented rate and scale. Species extinctions have accelerated over the last decades, with the concomitant loss of the functions and services they provide to human societies.

After the natural warming that followed the last Ice Age, there were repeated periods when masses of icebergs broke off from Antarctica into the Southern Ocean. A new data-model study now shows that it took only a decade to initiate this tipping point …

Rising oceans get more attention in climate change discussions, but rivers are rising, too, according to new research by a University of South Carolina postdoctoral fellow. The research shows that rivers need more attention in policy management and dis…

The World Climate Conference in Glasgow has just ended, and the question is whether the goal of maximum global heating of 1.5°C can still be achieved. In a model calculation, researchers show how the energy transition could lead to the lowest possible …

Previous research has found that chemotherapy can trigger muscle loss in people living with cancer, but a new study out of found it may also affect the way the body builds new muscle — and at lower doses than previously known, having potential implica…

Researchers have found that variants of this cone snail venom could offer future possibilities for developing new fast-acting drugs to help treat diabetics.

The most comprehensive survey conducted of elephant numbers in the Central African nation of Gabon since the late 1980s has found elephants occurring in higher numbers than previously thought.

People with type 2 diabetes who contract COVID-19 are nearly 50 percent more likely to wind up in intensive care if they have poorly managed their blood sugar levels over the long-term than those with better long-term glycemic control, according to a s…

Galápagos giant tortoises can weigh well over 300 pounds and often live over 100 years. So what’s the secret to their evolutionary success? A new study concludes that compared with other turtles, these animals evolved to have extra copies of genes — c…

A ‘macrogrid’ that increases the electricity moving between America’s Eastern and Western interconnections, two of the biggest power grids on the planet, would more than pay for itself, according to new research.

Biologists have struggled to study rare and transient muscle cells involved in the process, but engineers have lifted the curtain on these elusive dynamics with the launch of scMuscle, one of the largest single-cell databases of its kind.

Researchers have conducted an empirical field study and concluded that single urban trees, such as street trees, function differently than trees grown in clusters featuring significantly greater transpiration rates. This result offers a new understandi…