Occupational, recreational and environmental noise exposure poses a serious public health threat going far beyond hearing damage, according to a new review in The Lancet.

The analysis team examined the latest research on noise's impact on an array of health indicators, including hearing loss, cardiovascular disease, cognitive performance, mental health, and sleep disturbance, in order to inform the medical community and lay public about the burden of both auditory and non-auditory effects of noise. 

Since their invention, antibiotics have made it possible to cure lethal bacterial infections but in recent years the efficacy of antibiotics has been drastically reduced due to overuse and resulting bacterial resistance.

Today, bacteria resistant to nearly all known antibiotics are prevalent in many parts of the world and in Europe alone more than 25,000 people die each year from infections caused by multi-resistant bacteria.

Researchers from
University of Copenhagen and the University of British Columbia

People who live in regions where there is a real change of seasons know that plants go 'dormant' in the winter and then spring to life again as the weather warms.

But a new study found a counter-intuitive effect; instead of a colder winter causing trees to hold off growth for a longer period of time, that happens during a warmer winter, according to an examination of 36 tree and shrub species. The colder the winter, the earlier native plants begin to grow again.

If global warming occurs and we get warmer winters, the spring development phase for typical forest trees might start later and later, which gives an advantage to shrubs and invasive trees that aren't as impacted by the cold.

A new psychology paper has found that, ethically, we get worn down over the course of a day. Our ability to avoid cheating or lying gets significantly reduced, making us more likely to be dishonest in the afternoon than in the morning, according to the authors - a conclusion which also defaults to the idea that we are biologically inclined to be cheat.

It's not correlation-causation but a new study has found that, among those with mental illnesses, left-handers are far more likely to suffer from psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. 

Scientists and psychologists have long been interested in handedness because the brain develops asymmetrically and some cognitive processes develop from the left or right side. Since hand dominance is a convenient measure it has been a focus for decades, with some research finding a great prevalence of psychosis in left-handed people.

Though the largest Sperm whales weigh up to 50 tons and and the smallest bat barely reaches a gram, they share something in common.

They both use echolocation, biological sonar, for hunting.

Echolocation systems are one of nature's most successful specializations. About 1,100 species of bats and roughly 80 species of toothed whales use the technique – that's 25% of all mammals. But why did such different animals as whales and bats evolve the same technique? It isn't biological kinship, bats and whales are no closer related to each other than all the other mammals that descended from the land vertebrates around 200 million years ago.