Science

[:es] Although the number of meta-analyses has exploded, many don’t bring clarity—whether it’s on the effect of “positive parenting,” the relation between antidepressants and suicide, or the health benefits of organic produce.[:]

[:es]Meningitis, pneumonia, deadly diarrhea. Antibiotic developers have long struggled to treat such dreaded diseases because the bacteria that cause them have double cell walls with an outer membrane that is particularly difficult for drugs to penetrate. The only new products to fight such gram-negative bacteria in the past 50 years are variations on existing, already…

[:es]Potterymaking in ancient Greece was a male-dominated profession, but about 3000 years ago, one woman from the island of Crete broke the mold to become the only known female master ceramicist in antiquity. The finding, based on a lengthy biomechanical analysis of her skeletal remains, sheds light on the elevated roles played by women in…

[:es]Some public health problems are so large you can see them from space. Artificial intelligence can use satellite images to estimate a region’s level of obesity—even without spotting the overweight people, a new study reveals. Instead, it relies on cues such as the distribution of buildings and trees[:]

[:es]So-called Ediacaran organisms have puzzled biologists for decades. To the untrained eye they look like fossilized plants, in tube or frond shapes up to 2 meters long. These strange life forms dominated Earth’s seas half a billion years ago, and scientists have long struggled to figure out whether they’re algae, fungi, or even an entirely…

[:es]For millions who can’t hear, lip reading offers a window into conversations that would be lost without it. But the practice is hard—and the results are often inaccurate. Now, researchers are reporting a new artificial intelligence (AI) program that outperformed professional lip readers and the best AI to date, with just half the error rate…

[:es]If astronomers are right, a ghostly particle that lit up an instrumented swathe of ice beneath the South Pole on 22 September last year was a messenger from a distant galaxy. The particle was a neutrino, electrically neutral and almost massless, which means its path could be traced back to the extragalactic event that created…

[:es]Southern Australia’s Strzelecki Desert is home to two very different landscapes: an area of 10-meter-high sand dunes with patches of dense woody shrubs, and—just a few kilometers away—shorter and flatter dunes surrounded by sparse vegetation. The reason for the difference? Dingoes.[:]

[:es]Billions of years ago, life crossed a threshold. Single cells started to band together, and a world of formless, unicellular life was on course to evolve into the riot of shapes and functions of multicellular life today, from ants to pear trees to people. It’s a transition as momentous as any in the history of…