From the persistent droughts of southern Africa and Central America in the early part of the year to the more recent devastating extreme rainfall in Spain and the deadly Hurricane Helene along America’s east coast, 2024 has been a year of climate events that affected the lives of billions of people.

As AI and robots become smarter and more integrated into daily life, they raise profound questions about ethics, law, and society. The Cambridge Handbook of the Law, Policy, and Regulation for Human-Robot Interaction dives into these challenges, offering global insights on privacy, trust, and the future of human-robot coexistence.

The domestication of plants and animals has played a key role in the development of human societies. And microbes, too, have been tamed: a study by Unil shows that the bacteria used to produce Gruyère, Emmental and Sbrinz cheese show signs of ancient domestication.

Waves of human migration across Europe during the first millennium AD have been revealed using a more precise method of analysing ancestry with ancient DNA, in research led by the Francis Crick Institute. The researchers can bring together a picture of how people moved across the world by looking at changes in their DNA.

A new research shows that resistant bacteria can regain susceptibility to antibiotics when the treatment is combined with a material equipped with antibacterial peptides. It also reveals that antibiotics can achieve a 64-fold increase in bactericidal effect when used together with the material, whose antibacterial properties are also greatly enhanced by this combination.

Researchers have found out that people with wide-ranging long Covid symptoms were twice as likely to have SARS-Cov-2 proteins in their blood, compared to those without long Covid symptoms.

A novel new test for bacteria in fluids makes it as easy as observing a colour change to confirm the presence of disease-causing pathogens, promising much easier diagnostic tests and greater food safety.

Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (Sick Kids) have uncovered that stress changes how our brain encodes and retrieves aversive memories, and discovered a promising new way to restore appropriate memory specificity in people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Researchers have developed a new model in which steam cells can be rapidly converted into brain cells with protein structures characteristic of Parkinson’s disease. This will help researchers to study Parkinson’s unique and highly variable disease pathology in a petri dish.

As the number and complexity of samples and drug products grows, pharmaceutical and biotechnology organisations are facing challenges in storing samples requiring ultra-low temperatures. However, advanced solutions exist to overcome these challenges — solutions that introduce centralisation, automation, innovation, and third-party services to sample management.