Previous analyses of the hominins from Sima de los Huesos in 2013 showed that their maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA was distantly related to Denisovans, extinct relatives of Neandertals in Asia. This was unexpected since their skeletal remains carry Neandertal-derived features. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have since worked on sequencing nuclear DNA from fossils from the cave, a challenging task as the extremely old DNA is degraded to very short fragments. The results now show that the Sima de los Huesos hominins were indeed early Neandertals. Neandertals may have acquired different mitochondrial genomes later, perhaps as the result of gene flow from Africa.

New doctor's orders: No earbuds, no music, and no watching TV while eating.

Researchers at Brigham Young University and Colorado State University have found that the noise your food makes while you're eating can have a significant effect on how much food you eat.

The "Crunch Effect," as they call it, suggests you're likely to eat less if you're more conscious of the sound your food makes while you're eating. Therefore, watching loud TV or listening to loud music while eating can mask eating sounds that keep you in check.

Biology lessons teach us that the brain is divided into separate areas, each of which processes a specific sense. But findings to be published in eLife show we can supercharge it to be more flexible.

Scientists at the Jagiellonian University in Poland taught Braille to sighted individuals and found that learning such a complex tactile task activates the visual cortex, when you'd only expect it to activate the tactile one.

"The textbooks tell us that the visual cortex processes visual tasks while the tactile cortex, called the somatosensory cortex, processes tasks related to touch," says lead author Marcin Szwed from Jagiellonian University.

The gradual accumulation of cell damage plays a very important role in the origin of ageing. There are many sources of cellular damage, however, which ones are really responsible for ageing and which ones are inconsequential for ageing is a question that still lacks an answer.

The Oxidative Hypothesis of Ageing -- also known as the Free Radicals Hypothesis -- was put forward in 1956 by Denham Harman. Since then, the large majority of attempts to prove that oxidative damage is relevant for ageing have failed, including multiple clinical trials in humans with antioxidant compounds. For this reason, although the accumulation of oxidative damage with ageing is undisputed, most scientists believe that it is a minor, almost irrelevant, cause of ageing.

The introduction of screening colonoscopy in Germany is showing results: Within ten years of the start of this screening program for the early detection of colorectal cancer, the number of new cases has significantly dropped in the age groups 55 years and over. This is the conclusion drawn by Hermann Brenner, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg and co-authors in the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2016; 113: 101-6).

I wrote this soon after ExoMars's successful launch to Mars, 2015. Hurray! In the program about the mission, before and during the launch, the presenters talked about the care they take to sterilize the lander of microbes to protect Mars. And indeed, kudos to all the space faring countries, and the planetary protection officers, for doing this. But in the same program they talked about ideas to send humans to Mars, talking about all its benefits. For some reason it never seems to occur to anyone to ask if humans can be sterilized in the same way as robots. There is nothing unusual about this - it's the same for programs from NASA, or programs about Mars on UK television, and anywhere.

DALLAS, March 14, 2016 -- Genetically inherited high levels of cholesterol are twice as common in the United States as previously believed, affecting 1 in 250 adults, according to new research in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.

The condition, familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), leads to severely elevated cholesterol levels from birth and is a leading cause of early heart attack.

Brides and the bereaved beware: You, like many shoppers, may have a tendency to reject thriftiness when your purchase is a matter of the heart, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

People are reluctant to seek cost-saving options when buying what they consider sacred -- such as engagement rings, cremation urns, or even desserts for a birthday party -- for or to commemorate loved ones. The paper, published in the most recent volume of Judgment and Decision Making, is the first to examine the implications of this phenomenon.