President Biden is touting his strong economic performance but the public disagrees; his approval rating is in the 30th percentile because an expanding economy as framed by politicians still means high inflation to people paying taxes. The psychological impacts of bad economic performance are evident also; when times are good, spending makes people happy. When times are bad, spending is stressful. Customers even leave worse reviews, according to a new paper.

Thankfully, most people who get COVID–19 don’t become seriously ill – especially those who are vaccinated. But a small fraction do get hospitalized, and a smaller fraction do die. If you are vaccinated and catch the coronavirus, what are your chances of getting hospitalized or dying?

As an epidemiologist, I have been asked to respond to this question in one form or another throughout the pandemic. This is a very reasonable question to ask, but a challenging one to answer.

One of the most important examples of early art in Europe, a 11 cm high figurine colloquially dubbed a 'Venus' and found in Willendorf, Austria, is made of a rock called "oolite" which is not found in or around Willendorf. 

New high-resolution tomographic images lead the authors to concluse the material from which the Venus was carved likely comes from northern Italy or possible eastern Ukraine, which sheds new light on the mobility of the first modern humans south and north of the Alps. 

For more than a century, journalism education prepared young people for the role of full-time professionals employed by sizeable news organisations. But the advertising-based business model that sustained journalism is collapsing because of new technology, and jobs of the old kind are becoming scarce. The educational model, too, must change to accommodate the new realities.

Eighteenth-century socialites have been depicted as vain, silly women who were poisoned by their white lead makeup. The Countess of Coventry, Maria Gunning — a society hostess renowned for her beauty — is said to have refused to stop wearing foundation containing white lead, even as she lay dying. Why would women of that era knowingly choose to wear makeup that was killing them? Was beauty worth dying for? Or was the makeup not to blame?

The behaviour of matter at quantum level includes a number of surprising effects, which we are lucky enough to be able to study and observe in different physical systems. Some of these effects are due to the radically different properties of particles endowed with integer amounts of spin (which we call bosons), and particles endowed with half-integer amounts of spin (which we call fermions).

A new analysis of human remains from ancient DNA of six individuals buried in Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia who lived between 18,000 and 5,000 years ago has produced the earliest DNA from the continent, and giving some insight into how early humans lived, traveled and even found love. 

The study also reanalyzed published data from 28 individuals buried at sites across the continent, generating new and improved data for 15 of them. The dataset of DNA from ancient African foragers reveals a genetic legacy difficult to reconstruct from present-day people because of the many population movements and mixtures that have occurred in the last few thousand years.

There is a myth that people act differently during a full moon but nurses swear by it because of perception of an increase in emergency room cases. Now demographers have linked heat waves to emergency care, except the mental health kind.

The paper correlated days with higher-than-normal temperatures during the summer season in the United States to increased rates of emergency department (ED) visits for any mental health-related condition, particularly substance use, anxiety and stress disorders, and mood disorders.

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-long bursts of radiation recorded on radio waves. They are extremely powerful - for example, during one of the brightest flashes lasting five milliseconds, as much energy is radiated as our Sun generates in a month. The scale of the phenomenon is difficult to imagine. A new study tracks down their source.

HIV normally uses the CCR5 co-receptor to help it infect immune cells, but the receptor’s Δ32 variant effectively blocks viral entry but a 14-month success story using cord blood containing an HIV-resistance gene variant called CCR5Δ32 means HIV has been cured in a patient.