Research

Researchers have identified 12 specific areas of the DNA sequence that are robustly related with the age at which we have our first child, and the total number of children we have during the course of our life.

There is a 'strong, dynamic' relationship between people having their benefits stopped and an increase in referral to foodbanks, new research has found.

In a paper, published in Nature, the research team says this finding is significant because archaeologists had always understood that the production of multiple stone flakes with characteristics such as conchoidal fractures and sharp cutting edges was a behaviour unique to hominins.

A freely-available suite of statistical tools developed at the University of Oxford is providing major companies with valuable tools for drug discovery.

The study is part of the international Beaker People project led by Professor Mike Parker Pearson of University College London, and involves scientists from many institutions, including the universities of Oxford, Durham, Bradford, University College London, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolu

The claim that 'helping makes you happy' has become a staple of pop psychology and self-help manuals. Performing 'random acts of kindness' has been touted as a sure-fire way of boosting your mood — doing good makes you feel good, as well as benefiting others.

The University of Oxford has led a project developing mobile applications designed to advance the training and supervision of community health workers in Kenya

The 'online gig economy' is a new labour market where employers use online labour platforms to engage workers for piecemeal, short-term or project-based work delivered over the internet.

The ambition of the 2015 Paris Agreement of the 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change took the world by surprise.

Active monitoring is as effective as surgery and radiotherapy, in terms of survival at 10 years, reports the largest study of its kind, funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

The study authored by Atif Ansar, Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier and Daniel Lunn is based on the largest dataset of its kind. It analyses 95 large Chinese road and rail transport projects, and 806 transport projects built in rich democracies.

A picture has emerged of many boys being taken out of school to work on the family farm or business, or in paid work. Girls had greater flexibility to combine their household responsibilities with their schooling so were able to progress academically.

Anthropologists have discovered that intense experiences of crucial wins and losses shared with fellow fans bind them more tightly to one another and their club.

Until now scholars have had only vague evidence for dating when events happened during the earliest periods of civilisation, with estimates being within hundreds of years.

Researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Southern California examined whether road traffic deaths related to drunk driving declined in counties where Uber had started operating.

Researchers say, to date, they have found the earliest archaeological examples of monkey tool use outside of Africa.

They calculate that in Paris, the hottest city in Europe during the heatwave in summer 2003, 506 out of 735 summer deaths recorded in the French capital were due to a heatwave made worse by man-made climate change.

Environmental records obtained from archaeological sites where there are Middle Stone Age deposits are the subject of the study published in the journal, PLOS ONE.

The study drew on 190 records of unproven allegations against foster carers from all over England.

The research, published in the American Sociological Review, focuses on how Turkish and Moroccan immigrants have integrated in the Netherlands in the last decade by looking at joining and leaving rates for sports, leisure and neighbourhood associations of different ethnic composition.