Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Science & Society
There’s little evidence showing which police reforms work
When stories of police violence against civilians capture public attention, reforms follow despite a dearth of hard data quantifying their impact.
- Genetics
South Americans may have traveled to Polynesia 800 years ago
DNA analyses suggest that Indigenous people from South America had a role in the early peopling of Polynesia.
- Health & Medicine
What you need to know about the airborne transmission of COVID-19
More than 200 experts have implored the World Health Organization to acknowledge that the coronavirus can spread through the air.
- Science & Society
All kinds of outbreaks, from COVID-19 to violence, share the same principles
Adam Kucharski talks about his new book ‘The Rules of Contagion,’ a timely read during the coronavirus pandemic.
- Health & Medicine
How making a COVID-19 vaccine confronts thorny ethical issues
COVID-19 vaccines will face plenty of ethical questions. Concerns arise long before anything is loaded into a syringe.
- Humans
Underwater caves once hosted the Americas’ oldest known ochre mines
Now-submerged chambers in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula contain ancient evidence of extensive red ochre removal as early as 12,000 years ago.
- Health & Medicine
4 reasons not to worry about that ‘new’ swine flu in the news
Researchers identified a pig influenza virus that shares features with one that sparked the 2009 pandemic — that doesn’t mean another one is imminent.
- Health & Medicine
Why COVID-19 is both startlingly unique and painfully familiar
As doctors and patients learn more about the wide range of COVID-19 symptoms, the coronavirus is proving both novel and recognizable.
- Health & Medicine
Here’s what we’ve learned in six months of COVID-19 — and what we still don’t know
Six months into the new coronavirus pandemic, researchers have raced to uncover crucial information about SARS-CoV-2. But much is still unknown.
- Psychology
Monkeys may share a key grammar-related skill with humans
A contested study suggests the ability to embed sequences within other sequences, a skill called recursion and crucial to grammar, has ancient roots.
- Health & Medicine
Why scientists say wearing masks shouldn’t be controversial
New data suggest that cloth masks work to reduce coronavirus cases, though less well than medical masks.
- Health & Medicine
Strokes and mental state changes hint at how COVID-19 harms the brain
In a group of people severely ill from the coronavirus, strokes, psychosis, depression and other brain-related changes come as complications.
