Scholars have found that the causes of congenital face blindness can be traced back to an early stage in the perceptual process. 

Groundwater in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Myanmar, Vietnam and China commonly contains concentrations of arsenic 20 to 100 times greater than the World Health Organization's recommended limit, resulting in more than 100 million people being poisoned by drinking arsenic-laced water. Now scientists have found where the microbes responsible for releasing dangerous arsenic into groundwater in Southeast Asia get their food. 

Seville, Spain - 5 December 2015: Latin American migrants in Spain should be screened for Chagas disease, particularly women before pregnancy, doctors urged today at EuroEcho-Imaging 2015.1

The annual meeting of the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI), a registered branch of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), is held 2 to 5 December 2015 in Seville, Spain.

There have been recent high-profile claims suggesting genetics and neuroscience are set to radically change the way we think about crime and punishment. Author Sam Harris, for example, argues that recent discoveries in neuroscience undermine our notion of free will, while Adrian Raine states there is a “biological basis also to recidivistic violent offending”.

But are our notions of blame and responsibility really heading for a revolution?

The extinct three-horned palaeomerycid ruminant, Xenokeryx amidalae, found in Spain, may be from the same clade as giraffes, according to a study published December 2, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Israel M. Sánchez from the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales-CSIC, Madrid, Spain, and colleagues.

A 13,000 year-old engraving uncovered in Spain may depict a hunter-gatherer campsite, according to a study published December 2, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Marcos García-Diez from University of the Basque Country, Spain, and Manuel Vaquero from Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution - IPHES, Spain.

Manuel Vaquero suggests that this "paleolithic engraving from northeastern Spain brings us the first representation of a human social group."

New research from of the Sexuality and Gender Laboratory at Queen's University shows that heterosexual women have more diverse patterns of sexual response than previously reported.

Research on women's sexual orientation and patterns of sexual response has previously focused on women's genital and subjective sexual arousal relative to their sexual identity, as heterosexual, bisexual or lesbian. Among women, however, there is significant diversity among women in their sexual attractions to other women and men, regardless of sexual identity. For example, a substantial minority of heterosexual women (20 per cent in some studies) also report some attraction to women.

PORTLAND, Ore., Dec. 4, 2015 -- A coordinated push to decrypt a complex form of leukemia is delivering a trove of new drug candidates and treatment ideas, a dozen of which will be presented at the American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida (Dec. 5-8).

The research initiative generating these leads, Beat AML, is led by the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University and The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). Beat AML brings together academic health centers and biopharmaceutical companies to accelerate discoveries that will improve outcomes for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a blood cancer lacking effective treatments. Less than 25 percent of newly diagnosed patients survive beyond five years.

Sometimes viruses do not attack right away, they instead find a way to enter the cells of the human body without tripping the alarm, and stay there without notice until it is time to strike. It’s how viruses in the herpesvirus family, like human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), do their business.

HCMV infects people at high rates all around the world. People with compromised or weakened immune systems are especially vulnerable. In newborn babies, the virus can cause deafness, intellectual disability and learning disorders. Other viruses in the herpesvirus family can cause cancer, shingles and mononucleosis. Once people are infected, they will have the virus their entire lives, due to its ability to cycle between latent and active states in the body.

There has long been evidence that lifestyles of parents could influence offspring - a parent who smokes or does drugs has a greater chance of having a child with a birth defect - but epigenetics is a brand new world of how choices can be passed through generations, because it says that the environment may affect how cells read genes instead of causing changes in the DNA sequence.