The chimpanzee was sick. It had diarrhea and tapeworms — not unusual for a wild chimpanzee in the Budongo Forest of Uganda. What intrigued the watching research team was what the ape did about it.Soon after its symptoms developed, the male traveled with two ot... More »
Dr. Hans Klingemann, pioneering immunotherapy scientist, has studied whether the innovative treatment could save his two pets.Immunotherapy has transformed cancer treatment. It tinkers with the immune system to attack malignancies that have evaded the body’s n... More »
The Milky Way spreads across the night sky above the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Credit: Rubin Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / H. StockebrandThe casual observer may envision the night sky as being static: When we look ... More »
AI chatbots have become increasingly comfortable in the art of human conversation. The trouble is, experts say, they’re prone to giving inaccurate or nonsensical answers, known as “hallucinations.”Now, researchers have come up with a potential solution: using ... More »
Scientists have discovered differences in the immune response that could explain why some people seem to reliably escape Covid infection.The study, in which healthy adults were intentionally given a small nasal dose of Covid virus, suggested that specialised i... More »
Natacha Gray is singing the song she has written about living with long Covid. It’s a lovely, haunting song and she sings it beautifully. It begins:There’s a piano in my home Untouched for many months With black and white keys That gather up dustThe piano i... More »
World leaders are “gambling with their children’s and grandchildren’s health and wellbeing” by failing to prepare for a future pandemic, a new report warns.Amid surging cases of H5N1 bird flu in mammals, and an mpox outbreak in central Africa, two senior state... More »
Many new technologies are being developed to help diagnose mental illnesses. Illustration by Emily Lankiewicz / Public DomainWhoever said the eyes are the windows to the soul probably didn’t imagine them being a key to diag... More »
Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, genetics has become one of the key frameworks for how we all think about ourselves. From fretting about our health to debating how schools can accommodate non-neurotypical pupils, we reach for the idea that gen... More »
Ten years ago, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom published Superintelligence, a book exploring how superintelligent machines could be created and what the implications of such technology might be. One was that such a machine, if it were created, would be dif... More »
Dr Joseph Cotter takes some unusual pieces of luggage on his trips on the London underground. They include a stainless steel vacuum chamber, a few billion atoms of rubidium and an array of lasers that are used to cool his equipment to a temperature just above ... More »
While scientists have seen colossal squid before—like this specimen examined by New Zealander researchers in 2014—their interactions have always been with animals that were either pulled from the depths, washed up on shore or otherwise removed from their natur... More »