NEWSWORTHY
Hit songs today are "happier," more danceable and more likely to be sung by women than songs that fail to make it to the charts, a study into 30 years of musical evolution revealed Wednesday. But also it noted a somber trend: while people clearly ...
Messing with the natural rhythm of one's internal clock may boost the risk of developing mood problems ranging from garden-variety loneliness to severe depression and bipolar disorder, researchers said Wednesday. The largest study of its kind, involving more than 91,000 people, also linked interference with ...
Artificial intelligence has a new challenge: whether and how to alert people who may not know they are talking to a robot. Tuesday, Google showed off a computer assistant that makes convincingly human-sounding phone calls, at least in its prerecorded demonstration. But the real people ...
Mind games: North Korean detention may have scarred U.S. prisoners
Three Americans released from North Korean captivity Wednesday are at risk of a range of symptoms, from crippling anxiety to severe depression, as a result of the trauma experienced during their imprisonment. Half a dozen experts said the men could suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, ...
A study of nearly half a million people has uncovered 30 new genes linked to depression, tripling the number known to play a role in the debilitating disease. The same enlarged basket of depression genes also underpins other psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, a consortium ...
People who stay up late and have to drag themselves out of bed are likelier to die younger than those who rise and set with the sun, researchers said Thursday. A survey of more than 430,000 people in Britain found that night owls had a ...
New study contradicts another recent one on whether older brains can generate new neurons
People as old as 79 may still generate new brain cells, U.S. researchers said Thursday, stoking fresh debate among scientists over whether or when our mental capacity ever stops growing. The report by scientists at Columbia University in New York, published in the journal Cell ...
How to test your favorite conspiracy theory
In most cases, witnesses are unreliable, and the stories are too complicated to be true.
A vast study that sought to settle a long-standing debate about whether or not antidepressant drugs really work has found they are indeed effective in relieving acute depression in adults. The international study — a meta-analysis pooling results of 522 trials covering 21 commonly used ...
Analysis finds shape of human brain evolved over time to accommodate key advances in function
An analysis of fossils including the oldest-known Homo sapiens specimen has revealed that brain shape in our species evolved over time to become less elongated and more globular, a change that appears to have accommodated key advances in its function. Scientists said Wednesday they examined ...
Sex-crazed, easy-going and cooperative, bonobos are often described as the "hippies" of the ape world. But unlike humans, they seem to have a fondness for bullies, researchers said Thursday. A report in the journal Current Biology unveiled a new aspect to the personalities of bonobos, ...
Science stories you might have missed in 2017
Birds barter shrewdly, brainless jellyfish sleep and researchers raise their statistical standards.
