Early music training may not only support the development of music perception in infants, but also benefit their speech learning, a U.S. study said Monday. The study, published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that a series of music lessons improved nine-month-old babies' brain processing of both music and new speech sounds. "Our studyRead more

A billionaire businessman from the United Arab Emirates launched the Arab world’s largest education fund on Wednesday, setting aside $1.14 billion (AED4.2 billion) in grants for underserved youth from the region. The Abdulla Al-Ghurair Foundation for Education said it plans to provide scholarships for 15,000 Middle Eastern students over the next 10 years. The recipients will be students in needRead more

In a new study, researchers from the University of California-Los Angeles studied tumor response and overall survival following the administration of a new treatment among patients with advanced melanoma. This agent, called pembrolizumab, is an antibody that blocks PD-1, a protein which prevents the body's immune system from attacking the cancer. The researchers tested pembrolizumab on more than 650 patientsRead more

Billionaire Russian investor Yuri Milner and British cosmologist Stephen Hawking on Tuesday announced an ambitious new space initiative for a mission to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to Earth. Milner and Hawking are spearheading the "Breakthrough Starshot" team of scientists working on the bold research program to create a fleet of super-compact, ultra-light space vehicles or "nanocraft." The goalRead more

The world's earliest humans, dubbed "hobbits," may not have co-existed with modern humans as first thought with new research published Thursday pushing back their disappearance by 50,000 years after new excavations revealed flaws in the original dating. The new timeframe coincides with the arrival of humans from Australia, giving weight to the theory the modern Homo sapiens played a roleRead more

Women have an increased risk of miscarriage if they or their partner consume more than two caffeinated drinks a day in the weeks leading up to conception, a new US study found. Women who drink more than two caffeinated beverages per day during the first seven weeks of pregnancy were also more likely to have a miscarriage, according to theRead more

American scientists have created in a lab the smallest viable genome existing in nature with just enough essential genes for an organism to function and reproduce on its own, in a major step toward unlocking the mysteries of how life is created. The synthetic genome of this bacteria, dubbed JCVI-syn3.0, only carries 473 genes, compared to about 20,000 for aRead more

The Egyptian Petroleum Research Institute (EPRI) under Ahmed al Sabbagh received Thursday a delegation from the Engineering Faculty of the British University in Egypt (BUE). The meeting addressed ways to enhance bilateral scientific and research cooperation, Sabbagh said. Mechanisms for scientific cooperation in the fields of petrology, productive services, nanotechnology uses and training were all high on the agenda ofRead more

Members of the advisory board of the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) held a two-day meeting here ending Tuesday on developing research, improving academic outcomes and building entrepreneurial thinking. The 19th meeting of the board, consisting of leading local and international businesspeople and academics, held the discussions through several committees, according to Khaled S. Al-Sultan, KFUPM’s rector.Read more

The violent actions of a few extremists can alter the course of history, yet there persists a yawning gap between the potential impact of these individuals and what we understand about them. In Engineers of Jihad, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog uncover two unexpected facts, which they imaginatively leverage to narrow that gap: they find that a disproportionate share ofRead more