A plastic material already used in absorbable surgical sutures could also administer antibiotics to patients with brain infections, scientists report in a new study. Use of the material, placed directly on the brain's surface, could reduce the need for weeks of costly hospital stays now required for such treatment, they say in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience.

Detectives of both the amateur and occupational variety know that the best way to solve a mystery is to visit the scene where it began and look for clues.

Cosmological detectives do that too, by trying to peer as far back to the Big Bang as possible. A new analysis of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation data has taken the furthest look back through time yet – 100 years to 300,000 years after the Big Bang - and provided tantalizing new hints of clues as to what might have happened.

An international team has found evidence of substantial overlap for genetic risk factors shared between bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and schizophrenia and less overlap between those conditions and autism and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The root causes of psychiatric illnesses are not known. Instead, for the past 125 years, clinicians have based diagnosis on a collection of symptoms observed in patients, something medical science has long left behind - and so the race has been on to find biological links.

Here's a development that could have significant implications for electrochemistry, biochemistry, electrical engineering and many other fields: a Nature Materials paper is about computer simulations which find that the electrical conductivity of many materials increases with a strong electrical field in a universal way. 

Electrical conductivity is a measure of how strongly a given material conducts the flow of electric current and is generally understood in terms of Ohm's law, which states that the conductivity is independent of the magnitude of an applied electric field, i.e. the voltage per meter. This law is widely obeyed in weak applied fields, which means that most material samples can be ascribed a definite electrical resistance, measured in Ohms.

What group has above average interest in systems and scores below average in empathy?

If you answered autistic people, you are correct. If you answered girls with anorexia, also correct.

Girls with anorexia nervosa show a mild echo of the characteristics of autism, suggests new research. At first glance, anorexia and autism seem very different, but they both share certain features, such as rigid attitudes and behaviours, a tendency to be very self-focussed, and a fascination with detail. Both conditions also share similar alterations in structure and function of brain regions involved in social perception.

A young child buried in the medieval town of Ribe in Denmark 800 years ago had an unpleasant life even before that - because the child had been given a large dose of mercury in an attempt to cure a severe, ongoing illness. 

A new methodology developed by chemist Kaare Lund Rasmussen from University of Southern Denmark and colleagues can reveal an unprecedented amount of details about the time even shortly before a person's death. Mercury is of particular interest for the archaeologists as many cultures in different part of the world have been in contact with the rare (and toxic) element.