Spider webs are engineering marvels constructed by 8 legged experts with 400 million years of accumulated know-how. Much can be learned from the building of the spider's gossamer net and the operation of its sticky trap.  Amazingly, garden cross spiders can regenerate lost legs and use them immediately to build a web that is pitch-perfect, even though the new limb is much shorter than the one it replaced.

Extensive clinical evaluation from Public Health England and the University of Oxford show Lateral Flow Tests are accurate and sensitive enough to be used in the community, including for asymptomatic people. Lateral Flow Tests are rapid turnaround tests that can process COVID-19 samples on site without the need for laboratory equipment, with most generating results in under half an hour.

People across the Global South living with cardiovascular diseases and their risk factors may be missing potentially life-saving treatments because measures used to gauge their quality of healthcare are inadequate, a new study reveals. Conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, along with their risk factors, are major causes of death and disability, especially in Lowand Middle-income Countries (LMIC).

An international team of security researchers, including experts from the University of Birmingham, is presenting new side-channel attacks, which use fluctuations in software power consumption to access sensitive data on Intel CPUs. Power side-channel attacks are attacks that exploit fluctuations in power consumption to extract sensitive data such as cryptographic keys.

People with low aerobic and muscular fitness are nearly twice as likely to experience depression, finds a new study led by UCL researchers. Low fitness levels also predicted a 60% greater chance of anxiety, over a seven-year follow-up, according to the findings published in BMC Medicine .

More than two-thirds of patients hospitalised due to COVID-19 continue to suffer from debilitating symptoms more than seven weeks after being discharged, according to a new study co-led by UCL researchers. The study, carried out in collaboration with clinicians at the Royal Free London (RFL) and University College London Hospitals NHS Trust (UCLH), shows that 54 days after discharge, 69% of patients were still experiencing fatigue, 53% were suffering from persistent breathlessness, 34% still had a cough and 15% reported depression.

An international study into the costs and outcomes of informal end of life care has found that in the UK, Ireland and the US, care provided by informal carers, meaning family and friends, accounted for more than half of total care costs in the last three months of life.

Children of the 90s, a health study based at the University of Bristol, has today [10 November] published results from a study testing almost 5,000 participants for COVID-19 antibodies. The results found 4.3 per cent reported a positive result, of which a quarter were asymptomatic and did not report any symptoms in previous questionnaires.

India's transition to clean cooking fuels may be hampered by users' belief that using firewood is better for their families' wellbeing than switching to Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), a new study reveals. Women are considered primary family cooks in rural India and those featured in the study feel that both fuels support wellbeing.

A new study suggests that having COVID-19 increases a person's risk of developing psychiatric disorders, and that having a psychiatric disorder increases the chance of getting COVID-19.

Fitting birds with GPS trackers inside mini backpacks reveals what has been long suspected: urban gulls know exactly when and where to forage for human food. If you've ever seen a seagull snatch a pasty or felt their beady eyes on your sandwich in the park, you'd be right to suspect they know exactly when to strike to increase their chances of getting a human snack.

Loneliness is responsible for 18% of depression among people over 50 in England, according to a new study led by UCL researchers. The findings, published in The Lancet Psychiatry , suggest that almost one in five depression cases among older adults could be prevented if loneliness were eliminated. The researchers found that people's subjective experiences of loneliness contributed to depression up to 12 years later, independent of more objective measures of social isolation.

President Donald Trump's controversial use of social media is widely known and theories abound about its ulterior motives. New research published today claims to provide the first evidence-based analysis demonstrating the US President's Twitter account has been routinely deployed to divert attention away from a topic potentially harmful to his reputation, in turn suppressing negative related media coverage.

Scientists at UCL have invented a new experimental drug that aims to harness the full power of the immune system, launching a two-pronged response against cancer. The pioneering study in mice has been co-funded by Cancer Research UK. The innovative immunotherapy drug, developed by researchers at UCL Cancer Institute, targets suppressive 'regulatory' immune cells inside a tumour.

Female banded mongooses lead their groups into fights then try to mate with enemy males in the chaos of battle, new research has found. Meanwhile, males bear the costs of these fights - injuries and deaths are common. The mortality costs involved are similar to those seen in a handful of the most warlike mammals, including lions, chimpanzees, and humans Rufus Johnstone Mongooses rarely leave the group they are born into, so members are usually genetically related.

A major new study examining the relative safety of medicines for the treatment of gout will be presented at the American College of Rheumatology Convergence conference and will be published in The Lancet. The FAST Study finds no increased risk of cardiovascular events with febuxostat as compared with allopurinol.

Primary care networks need to increase the engagement of GP practices and wider primary care teams, and strengthen their leadership and management, to become firmly established to meet the challenges ahead, says a new study by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) BRACE Rapid Evaluation Centre undertaken by researchers at the University of Birmingham and RAND Europe.

Bristol researchers have developed a tiny device that paves the way for higher performance quantum computers and quantum communications, making them significantly faster than the current state-of-the-art. Researchers from the University of Bristol's Quantum Engineering Technology Labs (QET Labs) and Université Côte d'Azur have made a new miniaturized light detector to measure quantum features of light in more detail than ever before.

The capacity of the Amazon forest to store carbon in a changing climate will ultimately be determined by how fast trees die - and what kills them. Now, a huge new study has unravelled what factors control tree mortality rates in Amazon forests and helps to explain why tree mortality is increasing across the Amazon basin.

Fossils of small armoured amphibians provide the oldest evidence of a slingshot-style tongue, according to a new study co-led by a UCL researcher. The research team analysed 99-million-year-old fossils to find that the animals were sit-and-wait predators that snatched prey with a projectile firing of their tongue, as reported in the journal Science .