The universe has always had some trace of heavy elements, such as carbon and oxygen, for as far back as astronomers could 'see'. These elements, originally churned from the explosion of massive stars, formed the building blocks for planetary bodies and eventually for life on Earth.

No more, say researchers who  analyzed light from the most distant known quasar, ULAS
J112010641, a galactic nucleus more than 13 billion light-years from Earth, and found matter with no discernible trace of heavy elements. 

Cycling is safer than driving for young British males ages 17 to 20 - driving brings an almost five times greater risk per hour of an accident than cyclists of the same age.

If your pockets are empty and you have no money for roast beast this Christmas, there may still be hope. You could try remembering a better dinner and trick your brain into feeling full. That's episodic memory.

The memory of having eaten a large meal can make people feel less hungry hours after the meal, according to a paper by experimental psychologists at University of Bristol.

What Charles Darwin famously called "an abominable mystery", the apparent sudden appearance and rapid spread of flowering plants in the fossil record, is the topic of a paper which proposes new evidence that flowering plants - angiosperms - evolved and colonized various types of aquatic environments over about 45 million years in the early to middle Cretaceous Period.

Modern-day gypsies,  Europe's widespread Romani population, are now as diverse in language, lifestyle, and religion as any demographic but they all share a common past.

And that past started about 1,500 years ago  in northwestern India, according to the first genome-wide perspective on Romani origins and demographic history. With

If you want to go on a quest for solving the mysteries of deafness, discovering the genetic machinery in the inner ear that responds to sound waves and converts them into electrical impulses, the language of the brain, is your holy grail.

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) say have identified just such a chalice; a critical component of this ear-to-brain conversion is the protein called TMHS. This protein is a component of the mechanotransduction channels in the ear, which convert the signals from mechanical sound waves into electrical impulses transmitted to the nervous system.