Feature

Rising obesity rates have set off alarm bells for years. In 2018, 42 per cent of US adults were obese, up from about 30 per cent two decades earlier, and prevalence is climbing rapidly in other countries, as well. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines obesity...

Metsi Makhetha, the UN’s highest ranking official in Burkina Faso says the refugee situation in the West African is “getting more complex” and that aid agencies “simply must and will do more” to protect women and girls from sexual exploitation. A senior aid official, whose name is being withheld as...

 Samantha Jenkins was studying a number of types of fungus in a research project for her company, when one of the fungi made a bid for freedom. “Imagine a jar full of grain with a kind of lump of mushroom coming out of the top,” says the lead biotech engineer...

They rose to fame as the world’s fattest mice. At about 130 grammes, the rodents were “the equivalent of 600 pounds in humans,” says diabetes researcher Philipp Scherer. They were born to genetically engineered mouse parents in his lab at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. One set of...

To better understand how past cooking relates to modern data, researchers have dived into experimental archaeology. Starting in 2014, researchers cooked various recipes in store-bought unglazed ceramic pots every week. Over the course of a year, they used the same pot to cook the same recipe 50 times, then switched...

All cells and tissues are constantly telling each other what they need and whether they’re stressed through molecular signalling. “When you lose a chunk of cells in a heart attack, you lose part of that conversation,” explains Charles Murry, an experimental pathologist and director of the Institute for Stem Cell...

Twenty years ago, cardiologist and stem-cell scientist Piero Anversa published an exciting paper. He was then a prominent researcher at New York Medical College in Valhalla, and his data in mice showed that injured hearts could regenerate with the help of stem cells taken from bone marrow – contrary to...

The female immune system has developed a complicated strategy that enables it to fight off pathogens without endangering the foetus, says Melissa Wilson, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. At various stages of pregnancy, she says, the body seems to ramp up and turn down...

When Rhonda Voskuhl was a postdoctoral fellow at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the mid-1990s, it was common knowledge among clinicians that multiple sclerosis (MS) – an autoimmune disease that affects the brain and spinal cord – was about twice as common in women as in men....