An international team of researchers has sequenced the first complete genome of an Iberian farmer, which is also the first ancient genome from the entire Mediterranean area. This new genome allows to know the distinctive genetic changes of Neolithic migration in Southern Europe which led to the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer way of life.

The study is led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), in collaboration with the Centre for GeoGenetics in Denmark. The results are published in the Molecular Biology and Evolution journal.

Green frogs in the suburbs are undergoing a gender switch - but it isn't pesticides doing it, according to a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the same journal that set off the craze in thinking pesticides were causing frogs to change sex, by letting a member walk a study through peer review for a friend of his, by not mentioning that study had no data.

This morning I received a copy of the book "WHAT NEXT ? White Paper of CSN1", a publication of the Italian INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics) addressing the question of what awaits us after the Higgs discovery, and what projects should be supported in the long-term future of HEP.
The book is the result of one year of work by many colleagues who have actively participated in four working groups and one task force, producing some preliminary studies of the discovery potential of this or that machine, and of the most important questions that need to be answered -and the projects that appear more suited to answer them. Editors of the work are Franco Bedeschi, Roberto Tenchini, and John Walsh.

The working groups were thus titled:

It was inevitable.

The “Look at me! I can smoke pot legally!” generation has traded in the toast for the toke.

Instead of “tying the knot,” they are now “trying the pot.” Want the new couple to kiss? Forget about clinking your glass. Just inhale some gas. Tossing the bouquet? What a waste! If the bride is going to toss something that a bunch of single women will pounce on like a tiger on a baby antelope, it might as well be a brick of cheeba.

The recovery of waste heat in all kinds of processes will lead to making established processes more energy-efficient and more environmentally friendly.

The Spin Seebeck effect (SSE) is a rudimentarily understood effect which allows for the conversion of a heat flux into electrical energy, even in electrically non-conducting materials. A team of physicists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the University of Konstanz, TU Kaiserslautern, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have now succeeded in identifying the origin of the Spin Seebeck effect.

Midday naps are associated with reduced blood pressure levels and prescription of fewer antihypertensive medications, according to research presented at ESC Congress today by Dr Manolis Kallistratos, a cardiologist at Asklepieion Voula General Hospital in Athens, Greece.

Women living in poor areas in the UK are almost twice as likely to develop clinical anxiety as women in richer areas. However, whether men lived in poorer or richer areas made no difference to their levels of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). These are amongst the main findings of a major survey on how socio-economic factors affect mental health in the UK.

The study was part of the much larger EPIC program, which looked at the relationship between chronic diseases and the way people live their lives. The Cambridge group followed up the health of 11,422 women and 8,878 men resident in Norfolk, UK. Using detailed health and lifestyle questionnaires, they were able to unpick some of the factors which contributed to poor health over the 15-year period of the study.

In a way, cancer resembles a runaway car with a gas pedal stuck to the floor, hurling out of control. Most new targeted cancer therapies seek to fix the gas pedal itself, and thus thwart the aggressive behavior of the tumor. But for many types of cancers, the pedal simply cannot be repaired, so new alternatives are desperately needed. A team at Baylor College of Medicine has discovered a way to step on the brakes of some of the deadliest cancers.

Researchers from CSIRO and Imperial College London have assessed how widespread the threat of plastic is for the world's seabirds, including albatrosses, shearwaters and penguins, and found the majority of seabird species have plastic in their gut.

The study, led by Dr Chris Wilcox with co-authors Dr Denise Hardesty and Dr Erik van Sebille and published today in the journal PNAS, found that nearly 60 per cent of all seabird species have plastic in their gut.

Based on analysis of published studies since the early 1960s, the researchers found that plastic is increasingly common in seabird's stomachs.

In 1960, plastic was found in the stomach of less than 5 per cent of individual seabirds, rising to 80 per cent by 2010.

Europeans love to smoke but the good news is that the people who at least say they want to quit has risen in the last seven years, according to results from the latest EUROASPIRE surveys.

EUROASPIRE is a series of cross sectional surveys of the practice of preventive cardiology in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) and people at high risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD) across Europe. Four EUROASPIRE surveys have been conducted under the ESC's EORP initiative. EUROASPIRE III, conducted in 2006 to 2008, included for the first time people at high risk of developing CVD in general practice from 12 countries. The primary care arm of EUROASPIRE IV was carried out in 2014 to 2015 in 14 countries.