Health

The brain processes speech and its echo separately

Echoes can make speech harder to understand, and tuning out echoes in an audio recording is a notoriously difficulty engineering problem. The human brain, however, appears to solve the problem successfully by separating the sound into direct speech and its echo, according to a new study.

Environmental monitoring offers low-cost tool for typhoid fever surveillance

Researchers can accurately track where typhoid fever cases are highest by monitoring environmental samples for viruses called bacteriophages that specifically infect the bacterium that causes typhoid fever.

Ancient retroviruses played a key role in the evolution of vertebrate brains

Researchers report that ancient viruses may be to thank for myelin -- and, by extension, our large, complex brains. The team found that a retrovirus-derived genetic element or 'retrotransposon' is essential for myelin production in mammals, amphibians, and fish. The gene sequence, which they dubbed 'RetroMyelin,' is likely a result of ancient viral infection, and comparisons of RetroMyelin in mammals, amphibians, and fish suggest that retroviral infection and genome-invasion events occurred separately in each of these groups.

Why are measles cases rising and what is the MMR vaccine?

A boy with a measles rash taking his temperature

Young people are being encouraged to have the MMR jab, as cases of measles rise in several areas.

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The brain processes speech and its echo separately

Environmental monitoring offers low-cost tool for typhoid fever surveillance

Ancient retroviruses played a key role in the evolution of vertebrate brains

Why are measles cases rising and what is the MMR vaccine?

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