United Kingdom Science News API

{
    "totalArticles": 15378,
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        {
            "id": "1903a6a9e927aa2fb880b2a08040a8a1",
            "title": "Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia",
            "description": "Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of population history1, but its potential to reveal as much about human evolutionary biology has not been realized because of limited sample sizes and the difficulty of distinguishing sustained rises in allele frequency increasing fitness—directional selection—from shifts due to migrations, population structure, or non-adaptive purifying or stabilizing selection2–7. Here we present a method for detecting directional selection in ancient DNA time-series data that tests for consistent trends in allele frequency change over time, and apply it to 15,836 West Eurasians (10,016 with new data). Previous work has shown that classic hard sweeps driving advantageous mutations to fixation have been rare over the broad span of human evolution8,9. By contrast, in the past ten millennia, we find that many hundreds of alleles have been affected by strong directional selection. We also document one-standard-deviation changes on the scale of modern variation in combinations of alleles that today predict complex traits. This includes decreases in predicted body fat and schizophrenia, and increases in measures of cognitive performance. These effects were measured in industrialized societies, and it remains unclear how these relate to phenotypes that were adaptive in the past. We estimate selection coefficients at 9.7 million variants, enabling study of how Darwinian forces couple to allelic effects and shape the genetic architecture of complex traits. Analysis of 15,836 ancient West Eurasian genomes reveals hundreds of instances of directional selection, showing that sustained changes in allele frequency were widespread, rather than being rare over this period as previously assumed.",
            "content": "Liu, Y., Mao, X., Krause, J. & Fu, Q. Insights into human history from the first decade of ancient human genomics. Science 373, 1479–1484 (2021).\nMathieson, I. et al. Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians. Nature 528, 499–503 (20... [38656 chars]",
            "url": "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10358-1?error=cookies_not_supported&code=a3942a76-cbb2-4f6d-a7cd-38abe8312895",
            "image": "https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-026-10358-1/MediaObjects/41586_2026_10358_Fig1_HTML.png",
            "publishedAt": "2026-04-15T18:45:00Z",
            "lang": "en",
            "source": {
                "id": "7abf0df285fbe93cdccffcc7c4088737",
                "name": "Nature",
                "url": "https://www.nature.com"
            }
        },
        {
            "id": "2b8e2228890967e0dc580dcc80d550ff",
            "title": "Scientists Just Found Over 5.6 Million Bees Living Under a New York Cemetery, One of the Largest Bee Colonies Ever Recorded",
            "description": "Deep beneath this quiet New York cemetery lived a staggering number of bees. Scientists did not expect what they would find when they began investigating.",
            "content": "A quiet cemetery in Ithaca, New York is sitting on top of something huge, about 5.6 million ground-nesting bees. Scientists say this is one of the biggest bee aggregations ever recorded. It has likely been there for decades, mostly unnoticed.\nResearc... [3061 chars]",
            "url": "https://dailygalaxy.com/2026/04/5-6-million-bees-new-york-cemetery/",
            "image": "https://dailygalaxy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Scientists-Just-Found-Over-5.6-Million-Bees-Living-Under-a-New-York-Cemetery-One-of-the-Largest-Colonies-Ever-Recorded-scaled.jpg",
            "publishedAt": "2026-04-15T12:45:00Z",
            "lang": "en",
            "source": {
                "id": "15b3a075005c2186c70ef27f4d08b583",
                "name": "The Daily Galaxy",
                "url": "https://dailygalaxy.com"
            }
        },
        {
            "id": "7d7659dab3389b74661164b1b4b9a914",
            "title": "NASA's Photography Trainers Say Artemis II Astronauts Exceeded Their Expectations",
            "description": "The photography instructors at NASA say they were impressed with what the Artemis II crew captured on their historic voyage.",
            "content": "There’s little doubt that the Artemis II astronauts took some astounding photos on their historic trip to the Moon, but even their photography instructors back on Earth were taken aback by just how well they did.\nNASA photography and video trainers, ... [2770 chars]",
            "url": "https://petapixel.com/2026/04/15/nasas-photography-trainers-say-artemis-ii-astronauts-exceeded-their-expectations/",
            "image": "https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2026/04/Artemis-Photo-Training.jpg",
            "publishedAt": "2026-04-15T12:36:16Z",
            "lang": "en",
            "source": {
                "id": "7c9bbb3c4e144038df75cf7bda3c256e",
                "name": "PetaPixel",
                "url": "https://petapixel.com"
            }
        }
    ]
}