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From the moment Prince Harry and Meghan Markle made their relationship known to the public in 2016, the message many Britons sent to her was clear:You aren't one of us, and you aren't welcome.

Meghan, a biracial, divorced American actress, was far from what many envisioned as a fairy-tale match for a beloved member of the British royal family. While many in the UK welcomed her, the British tabloid media and a large swath of the Twitterverse were not kind.

While Meghan identifies as biracial, she is being treated as a black woman. Every black woman, including myself, knows what that means. As far as the world is concerned, your entire being is filtered through the color of your skin.

An Emory University neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold. "Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred – whether it's a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics – is a distinct cognitive process," says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.

The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward. "Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives," Berns says. "Our findings indicate that it's unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people's behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives."

Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values. "Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms," Berns says.

That was the purpose of a recent oral history event at the Royal Society, involving four senior scientists who began their careers in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than simply reminiscing, they were asked to recall their publishing experiences in scientific periodicals over the last fifty years. How have things changed since they published their first paper?

It became clear that the hierarchy of journals has changed over the last fifty years, and the pressure to publish in those considered to have the highest impact has increased considerably, partly a result of the increased volume of data being produced and the need for readers to filter relevant information from the copious amounts of less pertinent stuff available.

What have also changed are the technologies available to write a paper. Frith related the process she went through in writing her first paper: “I wrote my papers by long hand and then typed them myself.” Writing a biological paper before computers is one thing, but Ashmore remembered the problems of producing mathematical formulae in a typed manuscript, explaining that “you wrote the paper and probably took it along to somebody to be typed… And then it came back with spaces where you had to write in the equations.”

A group of scientists and economists is calling for the equivalent of the Apollo space programme to produce cheap, clean energy.

Their report, launched at London’s Royal Society, says on current projections the world will exceed the 2C danger threshold of climate change by 2035.

Some experts believe that energy technology has developed so fast that it simply needs further price support to keep volumes rising and costs falling.

“To design economic policy that promotes welfare and reduces poverty, we must first understand individual consumption choices,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in announcing the economics prize, the last of this year’s Nobels. “More than anyone else, Angus Deaton has enhanced this understanding.”

“Simple ways of looking at the world are often the basis of policy, and if the statements are wrong, then the policy may be wrong also,” said the economist Janet M. Currie, a Princeton colleague. “He’s always had a concern for trying to capture the complexity of the real world.”

Economics before the 1980s relied on the assumption that the people represented by a large economic aggregate behaved in roughly the same way, not because that made sense but because accounting for diversity was too hard.

Ebola tests in Edinburgh for patient who recently returned from west Africa

A woman who recently returned from west Africa is being tested for Ebola at a hospital in Edinburgh.

However, there has been no confirmation that she is suffering from the

The century-old detective stories are being studied by today’s neurologists – but why? As it turns out, not even modern technology can replace their lessons in rational thinking.

Arthur Conan Doyle was a physician himself, and there is evidence that he modelled the character of Holmes on one of the leading doctors of the day, Joseph Bell of the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary. “I thought I would try my hand at writing a story where the hero would treat crime as Dr Bell treated disease,”

Conan Doyle may have also drawn some inspiration from other doctors, such as William Gowers, who wrote the Bible of Neurology

A new study, published Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that the way sleep patterns change with age may be an evolutionary adaptation that helped our ancestors survive the night by ensuring one person in a community was awake at all times. The researchers called this phenomenon the “poorly sleeping grandparent hypothesis,” suggesting that an older member of a community who woke before dawn might have been crucial to spotting the threat of a hungry predator while younger people were still asleep. It may explain why people slept in mixed-age groups through much of human history.

The Hadza sleeping environment may have similarities to that of earlier humans, researchers said. They sleep outdoors or in grass huts in groups of 20 to 30 people without artificially regulating temperature or light. These conditions provide a suitable window to study the evolutionary aspects of sleep.

more than 220 total hours of sleep observation, researchers found only 18 minutes when all adults were sound asleep simultaneously. Typically, older participants in their 50s and 60s went to bed earlier and woke up earlier than those in their 20s and 30s. On average, more than a third of the group was alert, or lightly dozing, at any given time.

In fact, experts worry that the social media and text messages that have become so integral to teenage life are promoting anxiety and lowering self-esteem.

A survey conducted by the Royal Society for Public Health asked 14-24 year olds in the UK how social media platforms impacted their health and wellbeing. The survey results found that Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all led to increased feelings of depression, anxiety, poor body image and loneliness.

For one thing, modern teens are learning to do most of their communication while looking at a screen, not another person.

Each discipline within the natural sciences aims to produce knowledge about different aspects of the natural world. In this sense, each discipline within the natural sciences will tweak its methodology somewhat to fit its particular purpose and scope. Nevertheless, all disciplines within the natural sciences will broadly have a shared underlying scope, methodology and purpose.

You arguably trusted your teachers and believed that what they told you in science class was true. But under which circumstances should we accept second hand scientific knowledge? The motto of Britain's very first scientific society  (The Royal Society)  is "Nullius in Verba", which means "Take nobody's word for it".  One of the key features of the natural sciences is the necessity of being able to prove what you claim. Good science does not only require proof. It also actively invites peer-review and even falsification. For example, if your teacher claims that starch will turn blue when mixed with iodine, you will want to test this yourself. Within the natural sciences, you should be able to repeat experiments to see if a hypothesis is correct. But what should you conclude when an experiment 'does not work'? If this happens in you science lesson, you may have made a mistake.

There is no conventional “narrative” to Fortnite Battle Royale – Epic doesn’t provide an origin story for its endless 100-player wars, it doesn’t give us long cinematic scenes with characters explaining the world, the factions and the plot. Instead, Fortnite is split into a series of three-month-long seasons, each with a climactic event that suggests some kind of interdimensional struggle taking place over the future of the game’s isolated island locale.

Ostensibly, there’s no need for a narrative – Epic could, in theory, retain player interest simply by making sure there is a steady supply of new dance moves, costumes and scenic features to enjoy. Instead, the studio has built a vast functional universe in which an alien known as The Visitor is attempting to mend the space-time fissure around the island, and communicated this through systems of signs, signals and miracles – sort of like the Medieval Christian church

Indeed, it’s interesting how Fortnite has co-opted a lot of religious symbolism into the game’s suggestive narrative, from comets trailing across the sky, to the decidedly apocalyptic imagery of fire, brimstone and global destruction.

While modern science is built on the primacy of empirical data — appealing to the objectivity of facts — actual progress requires determined partisans to move it along.

Why wasn’t it the ancient Babylonians putting zero-gravity observatories into orbit around the earth,” Strevens asks, “the ancient Greeks engineering flu vaccines and transplanting hearts?”

transforming ordinary thinking humans into modern scientists entails “a morally and intellectually violent process.”

The moments we remember from the first years of our lives are often our most treasured because we have carried them longest. The chances are, they are also completely made up.

Around four out of every 10 of us have fabricated our first memory, according to researchers. This is thought to be because our brains do not develop the ability to store autobiographical memories at least until we reach two years old.

Yet a surprising number of us have some flicker of memory from before that age

“Race as we thought of it in the 17th and 18th centuries is wrong,” he said. “Yet in high school and college texts, race is still taught as if it were real.” -- Joseph Graves

“That message has never gotten to the American public,” said Graves, who noted he is the first African-American to hold a tenured position in the field of evolutionary biology.

“People are conflating ancestry with race, and they’re not equivalent,” said Duke geneticist and bioethicist Charmaine Royal.

Most recently, some researchers have found evidence that even some learned behaviors and physiological responses can be epigenetically inherited.

But in the 1950s, the botanist Royal Alexander Brink discovered that, under different environmental conditions, maize plants with identical genomes expressed different-colored kernels, and these colors were heritable. It was some of the first evidence for epigenetic inheritance. Since then, more examples of inheritance without a clear genetic basis have come to light, as have a variety of possible mechanisms for epigenetic inheritance.

C. elegans worms infected with viruses would defend themselves by generating small RNAs that targeted and neutralized the viruses. Moreover, the subsequent offspring of the roundworms also made these small protective RNAs, even though they had never been exposed to the viruses.

Royal Caribbean Cruises (RCL) has received a $2.2 billion revolving line credit to help the beleaguered company stay afloat, it announced Monday.

Stocks are deep in the red at midday. The Washington gridlock on fiscal stimulus measures has overshadowed hopes that the Federal Reserve's onslaught of new monetary moves would lift markets higher.

The novel coronavirus outbreak has forced many people to stay home and work -- and kids are "going" to school virtually as well. That's a big reason why video conferencing company Zoom Video Communications (ZM) has been one of the rare Wall Street winners while the broader market has plunged into bear status.

In a landmark trial, a cocktail of immunotherapy medications harnessed patients’ immune systems to kill their own cancer cells and prompted “a positive trend in survival”, according to researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London, and the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust.

Scientists found the combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab medications led to a reduction in the size of tumours in terminally-ill head and neck patients. In some, their cancer vanished altogether, with doctors stunned to find no detectable sign of disease.

the immunotherapy treatment also triggered far fewer side-effects compared with the often gruelling nature of “extreme” chemotherapy,

For the first time in 50 years, the directors of the IB are collaborating with schools to create an updated version of the qualification taken by 16 to 19-year-olds as an alternative to A-levels

A cohort of 20 pupils at UWC will drop a third of the traditional subjects usually studied within the IB. Instead they will spend 300 hours, over two years of study, on the new areas. Forms of assessment have yet to be finalised but there will be no exams on these subjects.

Learning will be project-based, collaborative and designed to tackle “multiple global crises” around the world. IB says it is creating the new qualification because there is a growing disconnect between the education children are receiving and the education they need.