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People sleep less in mid-adulthood than they do in early and late adulthood, finds a new study led by UCL, University of East Anglia and University of Lyon researchers. Sleep duration declines in early adulthood until age 33, and then picks up again at age 53, according to the findings published in Nature Communications .

The COVID-19 pandemic may have left people living with obesity more vulnerable to the cost-of-living crisis, warns a study led by UCL researchers. Adults with obesity surveyed in the study reported that their mental health - which is known to be associated with weight gain - had deteriorated between the end of the UK's first COVID-19 lockdown in July 2020 and September 2021.

How much someone likes a piece of artwork can impact their memory of when they first encountered it and which direction they were facing, finds new UCL-led research. The findings show that aesthetic experience is not limited to just the visual features of a piece of artwork, but also the moment in which it was viewed.

UK forests could store almost double the amount of carbon than previous calculations suggest, with consequences for our understanding of carbon stocks and humanity's response to climate change, according to a new study involving UCL researchers. For the study, published today in the journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence , the international team of scientists used a novel 3D scanning technique and analysis to assess the amount of aboveground biomass (AGB) - used to derive carbon storage - of 815 trees in a UK woodland.

Nature is a powerful tool that can be harnessed by social prescribers to improve people's health and wellbeing, according to a series of new evidence reviews led by a UCL researcher.

A new study involving UCL has uncovered how magnetic waves are transmitted past a standing shock wave, known as the bow shock, that forms ahead of Earth as a result of the solar wind hitting our magnetic bubble (magnetosphere). Shock waves occur in air when a plane travels faster than the speed of sound and also occur in plasma (a fourth state of matter that makes up 99% of the visible Universe) in space.

Dr Alexander Piel and Dr Fiona Stewart (both UCL Anthropology) discuss their new study in The Conversation which reveals the ability for humans to walk upright on two legs may have evolved in trees, and not on the ground as previously thought. There's no trait that distinguishes humans from all other mammals more clearly than the way we walk.

Human bipedalism - walking upright on two legs - may have evolved in trees, and not on the ground as previously thought, according to a new study involving UCL researchers. In the study, published today in the journal Science Advances, researchers from UCL, the University of Kent, and Duke University, USA, explored the behaviours of wild chimpanzees - our closest living relative - living in the Issa Valley of western Tanzania , within the region of the East African Rift Valley.

Professor Mark Hamer (UCL Surgery and Interventional Science) and his colleagues at the University of Sydney report in The Conversation their research finding people who averaged a few quick bursts of physical activity a day were significantly less likely to die prematurely. Most of us know that regular exercise is important for our health and longevity.

Healthcare workers in England experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at twice the rate of the general public, according to a new study co-led by UCL researchers. The research, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, was conducted as part of a wider study to establish a more accurate prevalence of mental disorders within the NHS workforce.

There have been significant improvements in care for patients undergoing hip and knee surgery through the NHS over the past 10 years, finds a new study led by UCL researchers. The study, published in BMJ Open, set out to evaluate the impact of Getting it Right First Time (GIRFT) , a national NHS improvement programme which started in 2012.

New symptoms may appear in children up to a year after initial infection with Covid-19, finds a new study led by UCL researchers. The Children and young people with Long Covid (CLoCk) study, published in The Lancet Regional Health - Europe , is the world's largest study on long Covid in children. Researchers asked children aged 11 to 17 about their health six months and 12 months after taking a PCR test between September 2020 and March 2021.

The anti-ageing drug rapamycin only prolongs the lifespan of female fruit flies, but not that of males, finds a new study co-led by UCL researchers. Working with researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne, the team reports in Nature Aging that in addition, rapamycin only slowed the development of age-related pathological changes in the gut in female flies.

Early life experiences can impact the activity of our genes much later on and even affect longevity, finds a new study in fruit flies led by UCL researchers. In the study published in Nature Aging , the scientists report that gene expression 'memory' can persist across the lifespan, and may present a novel target for improving late-life health.

Structural details of an attractive drug target in coronaviruses that could be used against SARS-CoV-2 and in future pandemics have been published by international teams co-led by UCL researchers. Two new studies published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences and eLife reveal pockets in an important piece of the virus' machinery that drugs could bind to in order to halt virus replication.

A new study led by UCL researchers has identified patterns in how common health conditions occur together in the same individuals, using data from four million patients in England. With advancing age, millions of people live with multiple conditions - sometimes referred to as multimorbidity - and the proportion of people affected in this way is expected to rise over the next decades.

Animals that live fast - that is, frequent or abundant reproduction and short lifespans - are more resilient to human-driven land use changes than those with slow life-histories, finds a new study led by UCL researchers. Across the globe, in areas that have experienced rapid expansion of cropland or bare soil, fast-lived species have increased in numbers in recent decades while slow-lived species are in decline, according to the findings published in Global Change Biology .

Powerful jets of material released by black holes are accelerated far into space by shock waves within the jets, an international collaboration involving UCL researchers has found. The study, published in Nature , helps to solve a decades-old mystery about how these jets are produced. The research team was able to rule out alternative causes of the jets - such as magnetic reconnection - and, out of a number of theoretical models of how the particles in the jets are accelerated, showed that just one model was correct.

A global open-source dataset of high-resolution images of Earth - the most extensive and detailed of its kind - has been developed by experts led by UCL with data from the European Space Agency (ESA). The free dataset, WorldStrat, will be presented at the NeurIPS 2022 conference in New Orleans. It includes nearly 10,000km² of free satellite images, showing every type of location, urban area and land use from agriculture, grasslands and forests to cities of every size and polar ice caps.

Researchers at UCL have grown 'mini eyes', which make it possible to study and better understand the development of blindness in Usher syndrome for the first time. The 3D 'mini eyes', known as organoids, were grown from stem cells generated from skin samples donated by patients at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH).