Science

U.S. health regulators on Friday denied an application for treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with the drug MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, saying more investigation needed to be done.

The company that submitted the application, Lykos Therapeutics, said in a statement that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had requested an additional Phase 3 clinical trial to study MDMA's "safety and efficacy."

Two astronauts stranded in space may sound like the start to a big-screen science thriller, but the Boeing Starliner mission is no work of Hollywood fiction.

Astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams were originally scheduled to spend a little more than a week aboard the International Space Station as part of the debut crew flight test of the Starliner.

Social platform X said Friday it would work European regulators after agreeing to suspended its heavily criticised use of European users' personal data to train its artificial intelligence chatbot Grok.

After Elon Musk's social platform began using personal data in public posts made by European users Ireland's data protection commission (DPC) launched a court case arguing that violated users' data privacy rights.

Scientists have discovered the world's oldest known seagrass in Finland, using a new method to determine the age of aquatic plants that put it at 1,403 years old, they said this week.

By measuring the number of genetic mutations occurring over time in seagrass -- which reproduces by cloning itself over and over again, the scientists were able to determine the age of the original ancestor plant with groundbreaking precision.

The Great Barrier Reef recently experienced the highest ocean temperatures in at least four centuries and faces an "existential threat" due to repeated mass coral bleaching episodes, a study published Wednesday in Science found.

The network of coral reefs off of Australia—the world's largest living structure—has faced five of the six hottest three-month periods of average surface temperature ever recorded just since 2016, each of which was accompanied by devastating coral bleaching.

Stirring the leaves of a shrub on his farm in Kyparissia, western Greece, Panos Adamopoulos spied the first soon-to-be-ripe mangoes -- his share of a state experiment against climate change.

"Right there!" he exclaimed.

Flying can be a nerve-wracking experience for many people -- but a new study out Thursday finds commercial air travel keeps getting safer, with the risk of death halving every decade.

The fatality rate fell to 1 per every 13.7 million passenger boardings globally in the 2018-2022 period, a major improvement from 1 per 7.9 million boardings in 2008-2017, according to a paper by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

What was meant to be a weeklong trip to the International Space Station (ISS) for the first NASA astronauts to fly with Boeing could extend to eight months, with the agency considering bringing them home on a SpaceX spaceship.

A final decision on whether to persist with Boeing's troubled Starliner -- which experienced worrying propulsion issues as it flew up to the orbital platform in June -- is expected later this month, officials said Wednesday in a call with reporters.

It is "increasingly likely" 2024 will be the hottest year on record, despite July ending a 13-month streak of monthly temperature records, the EU's climate monitor said Thursday.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said last month was the second warmest on record books going back to 1940, only slightly cooler than July 2023.

"I saw everything," says 74-year-old Harry Stackhouse from Illinois, who was awake during his recent kidney transplant. He felt no pain as he chatted with doctors, examined the donor organ, and watched the surgical team staple him back up.

Stackhouse was discharged just 36 hours after the procedure at Northwestern Medicine, which aims to make transplants without risky general anesthesia commonplace.

An insect bites off another insect’s leg. Is this predatory behavior, aggression, defense, competition or something else? In the case of carpenter ants, it’s for the good of the amputee and to the benefit of the colony.

A July 2024 University of Lausanne study found carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus) carry out lifesaving amputations on their colony siblings. It is the first known example of a non-human animal amputating limbs to prevent or stop the spread of infection.

There’s a perception that today’s youth are extremely narcissistic – fame-obsessed, selfish and vain. In fact, studies show this is a common view of young people, regardless of the times we live in. But are young people really more narcissistic? New research reveals that, as people age, they do tend to become less narcissistic.

Narcissism is a complex, multi-dimensional personality trait, which captures features beyond vanity and self-absorption. Emerging research suggests there are three different features (called “dimensions”) of narcissism: agentic, antagonistic and neurotic.