The Latest Breaking News from Gemma Ware

Oecusse, a rugged, remote district of Timor-Leste in south-east Asia, is usually a pretty sleepy place. It’s located on the western side of Timor island, part of Indonesia, and is isolated geographically from the rest of Timor-Leste, which has governed the eastern side of the island since 2002.

The majority of the world’s rechargeable batteries are now made using lithium-ion. Most rely on a combination of different rare earth metals such as cobalt or nickel for their electrodes. But around the world, teams of researchers are looking for alternative – and more sustainable – materials to build the…

The 6.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Morocco’s Atlas mountains on September 8 killed more than 2,000 people and left thousands more homeless. Parts of the old medina in the nearby city of Marrakech, a Unesco world heritage site, were left badly damaged.

Homs was once the centre of the Syrian revolution. Today, 12 years on, much of the city remains scarred and deserted after years of siege and heavy bombardment.

Imagine a particle so small that it’s the same relative size to a football as that ball is to the planet Earth. That’s the size of a quantum dot – a type of nanocrystal that changes colour depending on its size, and was once thought impossible to actually produce.

This week on The Conversation Weekly podcast we’re running a three-part series called Uncharted Brain: Decoding Dementia, which delves into new research searching for answers to how dementia works in the brain and the damage it leaves behind. Hosted by Paul Keaveny and Gemma Ware, it was initially published via…

There are many competing theories about what causes Alzheimer’s disease. For more than 30 years, Ruth Itzhaki has been accumulating evidence that viruses are involved in its development in the brain.

Dementia doesn’t just affect older people. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a form of dementia that athletes from a whole range of sports can develop. It’s now at the centre of a number of legal challenges involving sports from rugby to American football.

Scientists have been doing an array of regular health checks on the same group of people since they were born in 1946 – the world’s longest running cohort study. Now the brains of some of its participants are revealing new insights into the risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease.