Science

Insomnia is a common disorder linked with adverse long-term medical and psychiatric outcomes. It affects 10-20% of adults, and several twin and family studies suggested that about a third of the risk of insomnia is inherited. Now a team of scientists from the University of Exeter and Massachusetts General Hospital …

An international team of scientists from the UK, Switzerland and Latvia has developed a virus-like particle vaccine that could be used to treat chronic pain caused by osteoarthritis, by blocking the cause of the pain — the nerve growth factor. The new vaccine was tested in mice that had signs …

Mid-day sleep significantly decreases systolic and diastolic blood pressure in people with arterial hypertension, according to new research. Poulimenos et al found that people who took advantage of a mid-day snooze were more likely to have a noticeable drop in blood pressure compared with those who didn’t nap. Image credit: …

Flavonoids are a group of natural polyphenolic compounds with variable structures. They are found in fruits, vegetables, grains, bark, roots, stems, flowers, tea and wine. High levels of flavonoids, which have anti-inflammatory properties, are found in natural cocoa. According to a new study, flavonoid-rich cocoa may help curb the fatigue …

The mumps, measles, and rubella (MMR) vaccination does not increase the risk for autism, does not trigger autism in susceptible children, and is not associated with clustering of autism cases after vaccination, according to a nationwide cohort study from Denmark. Hviid et al conducted a nationwide cohort study of all …

Physicists from the AEgIS (Antihydrogen Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy) Collaboration at CERN have found a new way of making long-lived positronium atoms, which consist of an electron and a positron (antimatter counterpart of the electron), for antimatter gravity experiments. Positronium is a hydrogen-like atom consisting of a positron and an …

Physicists from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) Collaboration at CERN have discovered a previously unknown particle that consists of a charm quark and its antimatter counterpart, the charm antiquark. The mass and other properties of the new particle, ψ3(1D), place it squarely in the charmonium family that includes the …

A team of physicists from the University of Rochester and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has found a way to turn liquid metallic deuterium into a plasma — the fourth fundamental state of matter in the sequence: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma — and to observe the temperature where a …

A team of physicists from the Joint Quantum Institute, the University of Maryland, the University of California Berkeley and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics has implemented a test for quantum scrambling, a chaotic shuffling of the information stored among a collection of quantum particles. The team’s experiment, carried out on …

An international team of researchers has described six new species of bald-legged spiders from Colombia and established a new genus for four of them, Stormtropis. Stormtropis muisca, male. Image credit: Perafán et al, doi: 10.3897/zookeys.830.31433. Bald-legged spiders are members of Paratropididae, a family of only 11 very similarly looking, small- …