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A new first-of-its-kind study of DNA recovered from preserved human feces suggests that over the past thousand years the human gut has experienced an “extinction event,” losing dozens of species and becoming significantly less diverse.

Molecular anthropologist Christina Warinner, graduate student James Fellows Yates, and a large international team looked at the oral bacteria stuck to the teeth of Neanderthals and preagriculture modern humans that lived more than 10,000 years ago.

Researchers have, for the first time, decoded the neural signals associated with writing letters, then displayed typed versions of these letters in real time. They hope their invention could one day help people with paralysis communicate.

Newton may have been exceptional, but he can no longer be seen as William Wordsworth’s Romantic genius soaring in strange seas of thought alone, an abstract mind divorced from the mundane concerns that affect every human being.

Cicadas, like us, have come to rely on an interconnected ecosystem of their own creation that becomes more unwieldy and fragile with time, and that they can barely control.

Brain sex differences are tiny and swamped by the much greater variance in individuals’ brain measures across the population. And the same is true for most behavioral measures.

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That alarms us. Because in medicine, nearly everything we do is based on evidence. And the evidence that is weighed most heavily are the data published in our field’s top journals.