Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Archaeology
Fossils hint hominids migrated through a ‘green’ Arabia 300,000 years ago
A once-green Arabia may have enabled Stone Age entries by Homo groups.
- Tech
Virtual reality therapy has real-life benefits for some mental disorders
Cheap, user-friendly virtual reality hardware could help VR therapy go mainstream. Some treatments are ready for primetime, while others are still in early testing.
- Health & Medicine
The appendix is implicated in Parkinson’s disease
Removal of the appendix reduced the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, an analysis of nearly 1.7 million health records in Sweden suggests.
- Archaeology
People in the Pacific Northwest smoked tobacco long before Europeans showed up
Ancient indigenous groups in the Pacific Northwest used tobacco roughly 600 years before European settlers ventured west with the plant.
- Archaeology
Ancient South Americans tasted chocolate 1,500 years before anyone else
Artifacts with traces of cacao push back the known date for when the plant was first domesticated by 1,500 years.
- Health & Medicine
What the approval of the new flu drug Xofluza means for you
Xofluza, the first flu antiviral to be approved in 20 years, works differently from other flu drugs.
- Archaeology
Ancient Clovis people may have taken tool cues from earlier Americans
Ancient Americans’ spearpoints may have heralded later Clovis weapons.
- Life
Why some people may be more susceptible to deadly C. difficile infections
Proline, a type of amino acid, increases when gut microbe mixes are disturbed, giving this pathogen a ready food source.
- Health & Medicine
Teens use Juul e-cigarettes much more often than other vaping products
Such devices are more popular among youth than other e-cigarettes or regular cigarettes, a study finds.
- Health & Medicine
An eye disorder may have given Leonardo da Vinci an artistic edge
An analysis of portraits believed to portray Leonardo da Vinci offers evidence that the artist had exotropia, in which one eye turns outward.
- Life
How to make organ transplants last
New strategies aim to help transplant recipients keep their organs healthy with fewer (or no) immune suppressing drugs.
- Health & Medicine
New therapies pack a triple-drug punch to treat cystic fibrosis
In testing, a triple-drug therapy significantly improved lung function in cystic fibrosis patients with the most common disease-causing mutation.
