A patient's awareness of a diagnosis of cognitive impairment may diminish their self-assessment of quality of life, suggests new research.

According to one longstanding theory, our Solar System's formation was triggered by a shock wave from an exploding supernova. It injected material from the exploding star into a neighboring cloud of dust and gas, causing it to collapse in on itself and form the Sun and its surrounding planets. New work offers fresh evidence supporting this theory, modeling the Solar System's formation beyond the initial cloud collapse and into the intermediate stages of star formation.

Why is social media such a hard habit to break? Because it makes us feel good, say investigators. They found even brief exposure to a Facebook-related image (logo, screenshot) can cause a pleasurable response in frequent social media users, which in turn might trigger social media cravings. The combination of pleasant feelings and cravings makes social media too difficult to resist.

Scientists have developed a mouse model to study Zika virus transmitted sexually from males to females, as well as vertically from a pregnant female to her fetus. They are using the model to study how and when the virus is spread, including how the virus crosses the placenta, as well as to investigate potential treatments to block virus transmission.

New insights into the lifeways -- and death rites -- of the ancient people of Ireland are being provided through recent funerary studies.

New efforts to combine artificial intelligence with crowdsourced annotators and information encoded in domain-specific resources have now been revealed by researchers. The work has the potential to improve general search engines, as well as ones like those for medical knowledge or non-English texts.

The fountains standing next to the Museo del Prado are built using a sedimentary rock full of gastropod shells from the time of the dinosaurs. These fossils have revealed the origin of the stone: forgotten quarries in Redueña, in the province of Madrid, where the building material for the Fountain of Apollo and the Palacio de las Cortes also came from.

Researchers have investigated different sensory neural pathways involved in thermoregulation by injecting toxins into parts of the brain involved in 'feeling' and responding to temperature changes in the environment. They found that, even upon disabling the pathway for such feeling, rats were able to avoid uncomfortably hot and cold floor plates, but that disabling part of the lateral parabrachial nucleus-mediated pathway led to the loss of this behavior and the loss of core body temperature regulation.

A drug used for arthritis could be used to treat blood cancer, scientists have found. Polycythemia vera, a type of blood cancer, affects 3,000 people a year. This breakthrough offers an affordable and effective treatment, say the investigators.

A survey of tens of thousands of marine studies from the last decade reveals current threats to our marine environment. These include: the effects of climate change, marine plastic pollution, conservation, as well as social and economic impacts. It is hoped the method used to obtain this information, which has only just been made possible with advances in computational power, will enable the development of robust policies that ensure the future health of our seas.

Researchers have identified molecules which are responsible for metastatic lung cancer cells binding to blood vessels in the brain.

Researchers investigating nutrients in runoff from agricultural land warn that phosphorus losses will increase, due to climate change, unless this is mitigated by making major changes to agricultural practices.

Hemiplegic cerebral palsy hampers movement in one side of a person's body. In the first genetic study of its kind to exclusively focus on those with hemiplegic cerebral palsy, a group of researchers has investigated the genetic differences and hereditary factors involved in this neurodevelopmental condition.

A recent study sheds new light on the control of Russian knapweed, an invasive plant found in the Western US.

When a woman has an abnormal pap smear she usually undergoes colposcopy. Typically a metal instrument is used to obtain a small sampling of cells inside the cervix -- an oftentimes painful procedure for the patient. Now researchers have tested an alternative device called fabric-based endocervical curettage. This less painful device had significantly fewer 'inadequate' specimens -- meaning, patients didn't need to return for repeat biopsies.