Smell a friend: Evidence shows human beings ‘click’ instantly with people with similar body smell
People with similar body odours are more likely to ‘click’ and become instant friends, according to several experiments. When people meet others for the first time, they sometimes experience an “immediate strong click that makes us feel as if we have already been good friends for years,” says Inbal Ravreby...
How shades of inequality in research deepen discrimination by gender, age, education, incomes or race
Vida Maralani began her career studying whether education is, in fact, the ticket to socio-economic advancement and reducing inequalities, as she’d been taught. “I’ve evaluated some of the most expensive social policies our government has ever funded to prevent school dropouts,” says Maralani, interim director of the Centre for the...
Why eating bananas and other foods is key to eliminating risks of breathing blockage and breathing difficulties
Bananas may be beneficial for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). They are potassium-rich and contain antioxidants and fibre. Other sources of these nutrients are berries and whole grains. COPD is a group of diseases, including emphysema and chronic bronchitis. These conditions cause a blockage to the airflow and...
Wine may no longer get sweeter with age as climate change takes its toll on fruit chemistry and taste
Warming, wildfires and unpredictable weather threaten to disrupt the delicate processes that underlie treasured wines. Researchers and producers are innovating to keep ahead. Soon after the devastating Glass Fire sparked in California’s Napa Valley in September 2020, wine chemist Anita Oberholster’s inbox was brimming with hundreds of emails from panicked...
Tigray insurgency: Ethiopian prime minister owns up on crimes against humanity, but where is the law?
In June 2018, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali told Parliament that the post-1991 government used torture and killing to terrorise its people. Perpetrated in police detention centres, dungeons and prisons across the country, the state-sanctioned violence recounted by the prime minister amounts to crimes against humanity in international criminal...
Without intervention, a large outbreak of monkeypox with over 10,000 cases among MSM is highly likely
Sexual networks among men who have sex with men (MSM) are not different in nature from those of other groups, Lilith Whittles, an infectious disease modeller at Imperial College London, stresses, but a core group of people are much more densely connected than people outside the MSM community. They change...
New study links rapid spread of monkeypox to highly interconnected sexual networks in gay community
Ever since monkeypox started to sicken thousands of people worldwide this spring, two big questions have loomed: Why is a virus that has never managed to spread beyond a few cases outside Africa suddenly causing such a big, global outbreak? And why are the overwhelming majority of those affected men...
Scientists say they are making headway in getting to know how Covid supresses sense of smell
Researchers are finally making headway in understanding how the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus causes loss of smell. And a multitude of potential treatments to tackle the condition are undergoing clinical trials, including steroids and blood plasma. Once a tell-tale sign of Covid-19, smell disruption is becoming less common as the virus evolves....
Disasters: Most times when aid response fails to mitigate losses victims opt to put their lives on the line
Four months on from the landslide, the devastation was still clear to see: long and wide fissures crisscrossed San Isidro’s few main roads, running both down and across the hillside, while the collapsed and dangerously cracked buildings remained eerily empty. “I worked hard to have this and to raise my...
Volunteers step in to shield LGBTQI+ and other marginalised people from rights abuses in Ukraine
SAFEBOW, a grassroots organisation set up by Rain Dove and other activists, has helped more than 4,000 refugees from marginalised groups – including LGBTQI+, disabled, and elderly people, as well as Indian, African and other international students who were studying in Ukraine – leave Ukraine since Russia’s invasion began. The...
