The announcement that Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge (and, despite our title, not a princess, like Diana was, for arcane reasons that only experts in Teutonic monarchy understand) is expecting her first child is also bringing attention to a little-known pregnancy condition known as hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), a severe form of nausea and vomiting in pregnancy that can be debilitating because it causes serious dehydration and malnutrition. 

Gaming researcher Jonas Linderoth of the University of Gothenburg followed a group of players in the world's largest online role-play game World of Warcraft for a period of ten months. He observed the players almost daily in their fictional online lives and also filmed and interviewed them.

A new approach used to analyze genetic data to learn more about the history of populations says it can describe in detail events in recent history, over the past 2,000 years, more accurately than in the subjective texts used by people in the humanities. The computer scientists behind it demonstrate their method in two populations, the Ashkenazi Jews and the Masai people of Kenya, who represent two kinds of histories and relationships with neighboring populations - one remained isolated from surrounding groups and one had frequent cross-migration with nearby villages.  

Scientists have reaffirmed that pollinator services of large agriculture fields can be enhanced with a simple cost-effective measure - the creation of small patches of native plants within fruit orchards.

While the origins of modern behavior will never be known, new discovery about  technological advancement among our ancestors in southern Africa some 70,000 years ago, has taken a step closer to firmly establishing Africa, and especially South Africa, as a primary hub for the early development of our behavior.

A new research paper is the first detailed summary of the time periods a group of international researchers have been studying in South Africa: namely the Still Bay techno-traditions (c. 75 000 – 70 000 years) and the Howiesons Poort techno-tradition (c. 65 000 – 60 000 years).

Scientists trying to investigate mechanisms at work in Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases have a new tool. A transgenic variety of zebrafish, which is transparent in the early stages of its life, called the "MitoFish" enables them to see how brain diseases disturb the transport of mitochondria, the power plants of the cell -  within individual neurons of living animals.