Feature

Seventy years ago, sickle-cell disease was at the cutting edge of biomedical research as the first medical condition to be linked to a molecular cause. But the ensuing decades saw little progress in terms of clinical care, leaving patients afflicted with severe pain and dramatically shortened life expectancy. “There was...

Haematologist Mitesh Borad at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, and his colleagues have analysed the structure of the chimpanzee adenovirus used in the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and determined that it has a strong negative charge. Molecular simulations suggest that this charge, combined with aspects of the virus’s shape, could allow...

It was when the second person with unusual clots came in that Phillip Nicolson knew something was wrong. Blood clots are uncommon in young people, and it’s even rarer to see a combination of blood clots and alarmingly low levels of platelets – cell fragments that help to form clots....

When Rembrand Koning’s wife was giving birth to their first child in 2017, the couple was dismayed by the lack of technology for new mothers who were recovering from pregnancy complications. Baby scales were hard to use one-handed, breast pumps were frustrating and there were few resources to help Koning’s...

To evolutionary biologists, the genetics of homosexuality seems like a paradox. In theory, humans and other animals who are exclusively attracted to others of the same sex should be unlikely to produce many biological children, so any genes that predispose people to homosexuality would rarely be passed on to future...

A landmark study that endorsed a simple way to curb cheating is going to be retracted nearly a decade after a group of scientists found that it relied on faked data. According to the 2012 paper, when people signed an honesty declaration at the beginning of a form, rather than...

In essence, people who listen to whistled speech piece together its meaning from fragments of the full speech signal, just as all of us do when listening to someone at a crowded cocktail party. “Regular speech is so complex – there is so much redundant information,” says Fanny Meunier, a...

Tourists visiting La Gomera and El Hierro in the Canary Islands can often hear locals communicating over long distances by whistling – not a tune, but the Spanish language. “Good whistlers can understand all the messages,” says David Díaz Reyes, an independent ethnomusicologist and whistled-language researcher and teacher who lives...