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Significantly high levels of oral disease found among GB's elite athletes is leading to poorer on-field performance, research by UCL's Eastman Dental Institute has concluded. In the largest ever study of its kind, more than 350 sportsmen and women from nine GB Olympic teams, including swimming and rowing, along with Team Sky, England Rugby and Reading FC, underwent an oral health screening.

Listening to audiobooks elicits a more intense physiological and emotional reaction than watching films or television, according to a new UCL study. Commissioned by Audible, UCL research psychologists tested scenes from well-known stories across crime, sci-fi, fantasy, action and classical genres on 102 participants aged 18 to 55 to gauge the physiological impact of auditory versus visual storytelling mediums.

Bones of an entirely new but already extinct genus of gibbons have been discovered in China, revealing the magnitude of human-caused extinction of primates, according to a study by UCL and ZSL (Zoological Society of London). The discovery was made by scientists while studying the contents of a burial chamber in Shaanxi Province, central China and The ancient tomb dates from around 2,300 years ago and possibly belonged to Lady Xia - grandmother to China's first emperor, Qin Shihuang, the leader who ordered the building of the Great Wall of China and the Terracotta Warriors.

Climate change will have a rapidly increasing effect on the structure of global ecological communities over the next few decades, with amphibians and reptiles being significantly more affected than birds and mammals, a new report by UCL finds. The pace of change is set to outstrip loss to vertebrate communities caused by land use for agriculture and settlements, which is estimated to have already caused losses of over ten per cent.

The tendency for children to eat more or less when stressed and upset is mainly influenced by the home environment and not by genes, according to a new UCL-led study. The study, published today in Pediatric Obesity , found that genetics only play a small role in young children's emotional overeating and undereating, unlike other eating behaviours in childhood such as food fussiness.

A new smart app designed to improve the reading ability of people who have suffered a stroke provides 'significant' improvements, a UCL study has found. Developed by the Aphasia Lab (UCL Institute of Neurology), iReadMore provides computer-based reading therapy using written and spoken words and pictures, and aims to improve word-reading speed and accuracy.

Just over half of all births following spontaneous onset of labour occur between 1am and 7am with a peak around 4 am, according to a new study involving UCL, City, University of London and the National Childbirth Trust (NCT).

People with type 2 diabetes are 32% more likely to develop Parkinson's disease than those without diabetes, finds a new study by UCL, University of Oxford and Queen Mary University of London researchers. The research, published today in Neurology , the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, is the largest study to date on the link between the two conditions.

50-year-olds who have blood pressure that is higher than normal but still below the threshold commonly used when deciding to treat the condition, are at increased risk of developing dementia in later life, finds a new study led by UCL and French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris (INSERM) researchers.

For the first time in our planet's 4.5 billion-year history a single species, humans, is increasingly dictating its future, according to a new book by UCL scientists. The new epoch known as the Anthropocene - assessed in 2015 by Professors Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin in a report published in Nature - marks the period when human impacts on our home planet have become global and sustained.

Attending universal childcare from age three significantly improves the school readiness of children from immigrant and disadvantaged family backgrounds, a new UCL study has found. However, the research by the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM), shows the same universal childcare, only has a modest impact on the school readiness of children from advantaged backgrounds.

Magnetic reconnection - the explosive reconfiguration of two magnetic fields - occurs differently around Saturn than around Earth, according to new findings from the international Cassini mission involving UCL researchers. On Earth, the collisions which create aurora are only seen on the boundary between Earth's magnetic field and the magnetic field in interplanetary space.

If current trends continue, almost a quarter (22%) of the people in the world will be obese by 2045 (up from 14% in 2017), and one in eight (12%) will have type 2 diabetes (up from 9% in 2017), according to a study presented at this year's European Congress on Obesity in Vienna, Austria (23-26 May).

A quick and robust blood test that can detect liver damage before symptoms appear has been designed and verified using clinical samples by a team from UCL and University of Massachusetts. The researchers say the test could address a huge need for early detection of liver disease as it distinguishes between samples taken from healthy individuals and those with varying degrees of liver damage.

Grammar school pupils do not gain any advantage over children who do not attend a grammar school by age 14, according to a new study from UCL. In the first study of its kind, researchers from the UCL Institute of Education (IOE) looked at a range of social and emotional outcomes, including young people's engagement and well-being at school, their aspirations for the future, in addition to educational attainment levels, to determine the benefits of attending a grammar school.

The cell types underlying schizophrenia have been identified in a genetic study that looked for commonalities among the different genes already linked to the condition, find researchers at UCL, Karolinska Institutet (Sweden) and University of North Carolina (USA). The study, published today , offers a roadmap for the development of new therapies to target the condition.

An international study co-led by UCL has identified 133 genetic variants that could help predict the risk of developing glaucoma, the world's leading cause of incurable blindness. Other lead research institutions included King's College London, Moorfields Eye Hospital, Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School.

Women with HIV are failing to get the support they need during menopause, according to a new study led by UCL. The PRIME (Positive Transitions through the Menopause) report, which is one of the largest of its kind, involving almost 900 women living with HIV aged 45-60 across England, found that 47% of women with HIV do not have the information they need to manage menopause.

Older adults in England with fewer financial resources are more likely to develop dementia, according to new UCL research. Researchers analysed data from over 6000 adults born between 1902 and 1943 and found that the 20% most deprived adults were 50% more likely to develop dementia than the 20% least deprived adults.

Stars in a galaxy 13.28 billion light years away formed only 250 million years after the Big Bang, finds a team of international astronomers led by groups at UCL and Osaka Sangyo University in Japan. The discovery shows that stars in the galaxy - called MACS1149-JD1 - formed at an unexpectedly early stage in the age of the Universe and the new observations break the team's own record for detecting the most distant known source of oxygen.