Around 4,200 years ago, in the dry south-east of the Iberian Peninsula, a society began building cities on hilltops, stockpiling grain on a large scale and arming its warriors with halberds (blades like axe heads mounted on long poles) and metal swords. Archaeologists call it El Argar. Further north, in what are now La Mancha, […]

Thirty-five thousand spectators. That is the capacity the authors of a new study attribute to the Roman amphitheatre of Itálica, in Santiponce, near Seville in southern Spain. It is roughly the crowd of a mid-sized modern football stadium, and there was not a single loudspeaker in those stands. Whatever happened on the sand had to […]

Nearly 1,000 bones and teeth from three Granada caves show that Neolithic cannibalism was not one practice or one event. The dates and traces point to different stories.

The post What Happened in These Neolithic Caves? Human Bones Record More Than One Kind of Cannibalism appeared first on Curiosmos.

El Soplao, a fossil site tucked into the hills of Cantabria in northern Spain, stands out for yielding amber pieces with a blue-violet hue and abundant bioinclusions, according to a new review paper.

The post Spanish Amber Deposit Offers Rare Window into Cretaceous Life appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Paleontologists from Fundación Dinópolis have identified the first confirmed fossils of the genus Diplodocus found outside North America.

The post Diplodocus, Long Thought Exclusively American, Turns Up in Spain appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

One grape variety still grown in Spanish vineyards, hebén, has never gone out of cultivation for at least the last 1,100 years, according to the new study. That takes its lineage back to roughly the year 929, around when the Caliphate of Córdoba was proclaimed in southern Spain. Eleven centuries of unbroken agriculture, and the […]

In the United States, the phrase Indian Wars conjures a specific set of images: the Battle of Little Bighorn, the massacres at Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, the forced marches of the Trail of Tears, the decades-long manhunt for Geronimo. All of it is generally remembered as a 19th-century story, closed out by the early […]

Deep inside Ojo Guareña, one of the largest cave systems in Europe, in the northern Spanish province of Burgos, archaeologists have spent eleven consecutive summers digging through a single Neanderthal layer. This year’s season, which wrapped up in late August 2026, pushed the excavated area of that layer — known as level 4D — to […]

The preliminary research was conducted in mice, but scientists were optimistic the results would apply to humans. Clinical trials begin this month.

When we think about Roman society, the image that usually comes to mind is that of a world dominated by men: senators, magistrates, generals, and emperors. According to the traditional narrative, women occupied a secondary place, confined to the domestic sphere and excluded from public life. However, a recent study based on the analysis of […]

In 2006, geneticist Bryan Sykes, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, published the results of a study that had taken him a decade to complete. His team had collected and analyzed the mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome of 10,000 volunteers from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, with the aim of reconstructing the […]

Mar Carretero-Castrillo, an astrophysicist, returned to her remote village in Spain to be in the path of totality. Hundreds of partygoers came too.

Check the weather forecast, path and time of the eclipse near you.

Archaeologists reidentify a room once thought to be a shrine as a rare Roman library.

A new analysis of three skull fragments unearthed at the Gran Dolina cave site in Spain indicates that Homo antecessor had bone thickness closer to that of Neanderthals and modern people than to more archaic hominins.

The post Homo antecessor Had Surprisingly Modern Skull, New Fossils Suggest appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

Excavations carried out during the past month of July in the monumental complex of Guadalupe (Extremadura, Spain) have brought to light the foundation remains of the former Hospedería of the Catholic Monarchs (Guesthouse of the Catholic Monarchs), a lost historic building that has nothing to do with the current Hospedería del Real Monasterio that operates […]

A team of researchers from the University of Burgos and the Atapuerca Foundation has published the first detailed analysis of the bone retouchers found in the Valdegoba cave, in the municipality of Huérmeces (Burgos). This site, occupied by Neanderthals during the Middle Paleolithic, has yielded 38 bone fragments that were used as tools to retouch […]

Chronic pain is often treated as a medical problem that can be measured with scales, prescriptions, and clinical guidelines. For older adults, however, the experience of pain is also shaped by mobility, memory, sleep, mood, independence, and the ability to communicate with health professionals. A new study published in BMC Geriatrics places that lived experience at the center of the discussion, examining how older adults perceive chronic pain management in primary care settings.

The article, authored by P. Gopal, A. Kagarmanova, E. Staab and colleagues, focuses on a point where many long-term health decisions are made: the primary care clinic. Primary care clinicians are often the first professionals to evaluate persistent pain and the people most likely to coordinate treatment over months or years. This makes the setting especially important for older patients, who may be managing several chronic diseases and taking multiple medications at the same time.

Chronic pain is generally defined as pain that persists or recurs for longer than the expected period of tissue healing, commonly described as three months or more. It may arise from osteoarthritis, neuropathy, spinal disorders, previous injuries, cancer, or several conditions acting together. Unlike acute pain, which can serve as a warning signal, chronic pain involves complex changes in the nervous system. Repeated signals can increase the sensitivity of pain pathways, a process known as central sensitization, meaning that pain may continue even after the original injury has stabilized.

For older adults, treating this type of pain is rarely a matter of simply choosing a stronger drug. Age-related changes in kidney and liver function can alter how medicines are absorbed, processed, and eliminated. This can increase the risk of side effects from opioids, sedatives, anti-inflammatory drugs, and other treatments. At the same time, many older patients live with hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, or depression, conditions that can influence both the perception of pain and the safety of available therapies.

The study’s focus on perceptions is scientifically significant because clinical success cannot be judged only by changes in a numerical pain score. Two people who report the same intensity on a ten-point scale may have very different levels of disability, fear, sleep disruption, or confidence in their treatment. Older adults may value the ability to walk to the shops, sleep through the night, remain socially active, or avoid dependence on family members more than achieving complete elimination of pain. Understanding these priorities can help clinicians define treatment goals that are meaningful in everyday life.

Primary care also presents a distinctive communication challenge. Appointments may be brief, while chronic pain is influenced by physical, psychological, and social factors that require time to explain. Some patients may hesitate to report pain because they fear being dismissed, appearing demanding, or being prescribed medications they do not want. Others may assume that pain is an unavoidable part of aging. When these assumptions remain unspoken, clinicians can underestimate the burden of pain or recommend plans that patients cannot realistically follow.

A patient-centered approach attempts to address this gap by combining clinical evidence with the individual’s preferences, circumstances, and goals. In practice, that may involve medication review, physical therapy, exercise adapted to ability, occupational strategies, psychological support, sleep interventions, and education about pain biology. The technical principle is multimodal care: different treatments target different mechanisms and consequences of pain, potentially reducing reliance on any single intervention. For older adults, coordinated care can also help identify harmful drug interactions and prevent avoidable loss of function.

The research is arriving as health systems confront a rapidly aging population and growing demand for long-term pain care. Chronic pain affects quality of life, physical activity, and healthcare use, yet treatment remains inconsistent across communities. Access to physiotherapy, behavioral health services, specialist pain clinics, and transportation can vary sharply. These structural factors matter because a treatment plan may be clinically sound but ineffective if a patient cannot afford it, reach appointments, understand the instructions, or obtain help at home.

By examining older adults’ views, the paper contributes to a broader shift in pain research: away from treating patients as passive recipients of medical decisions and toward recognizing them as experts in their own daily experience. Their perspectives can reveal whether treatment goals are understandable, whether risks are being communicated clearly, and whether care plans fit real lives. Such information may help primary care teams design more responsive conversations about benefits, harms, uncertainty, and acceptable trade-offs.

The publication does not make the patient’s voice a decorative addition to pain medicine; it treats that voice as evidence relevant to clinical quality. As the medical community searches for safer and more individualized ways to manage chronic pain, the central question is increasingly practical: does the treatment help an older person live better, function more safely, and retain control over daily life? The study by Gopal, Kagarmanova, Staab and colleagues brings that question into primary care, where many of the most important decisions about persistent pain are made.

Subject of Research: Older adults’ perceptions of chronic pain management in primary care settings

Article Title: Perceptions of older adults on chronic pain management in primary care settings

Article References: Gopal, P., Kagarmanova, A., Staab, E. et al. “Perceptions of older adults on chronic pain management in primary care settings.” BMC Geriatrics (2026). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-026-08000-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12877-026-08000-w

Keywords: Older adults, chronic pain, pain management, primary care, patient perspectives, geriatrics

A new study suggests that deep brain stimulation may do more than control movement disorders: it could also help repair social behavior disrupted by pain experienced early in life. In research published in Translational Psychiatry, Wan, Du, Yang and colleagues report that stimulating the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex alleviated social deficits associated with early-life pain. The proposed mechanism is a restoration of the balance between excitatory and inhibitory neural signals, a fundamental process that determines how brain circuits respond, adapt and communicate.

Early-life pain has effects that can extend far beyond the moment of injury or medical treatment. During development, the nervous system is rapidly building connections, refining sensory pathways and establishing the networks that support emotion and social behavior. Excessive or poorly regulated pain signals during this period may alter that process. Instead of remaining confined to pain-processing circuits, these changes can influence stress responses, emotional regulation and the ability to interact with other individuals later in life.

The anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC, is particularly important in this story. Located in the frontal region of the brain, it helps integrate emotional information with attention, motivation and decision-making. It is also involved in processing the unpleasantness of pain and in evaluating social experiences. Because the ACC sits at the intersection of pain, emotion and social behavior, disturbances in its activity could provide a neural explanation for why early-life pain is linked to later difficulties with social interaction.

At the cellular level, the brain depends on a delicate equilibrium between excitation and inhibition. Excitatory neurons generally increase the likelihood that neighboring cells will fire, while inhibitory neurons suppress or constrain that activity. This excitatory/inhibitory, or E/I, balance allows neural circuits to remain flexible without becoming either silent or excessively active. If excitation dominates, networks may become unstable and hypersensitive; if inhibition dominates, communication and behavioral responses may be weakened. The study connects social deficits after early-life pain with disruption of this balance in the ACC.

Deep brain stimulation offers a way to influence such malfunctioning circuits directly. The technique uses electrical pulses delivered through precisely positioned electrodes to modify activity in targeted brain regions. Although DBS is best known clinically for treating Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor and several other neurological conditions, researchers are increasingly investigating whether it can reshape circuits involved in mood, motivation and social behavior. The new findings place the ACC among the brain regions that may be responsive to this approach.

According to the study, stimulation of the ACC improved social abnormalities linked to early-life pain while also normalizing indicators of excitatory and inhibitory signaling. This is important because it suggests that the behavioral improvement was not simply a generalized effect of activating the brain. Instead, the intervention may have acted on a specific circuit-level disturbance. By bringing opposing neural forces back toward equilibrium, DBS could make the ACC more capable of processing social information and generating appropriate responses.

The result also highlights a shift in how scientists understand the consequences of pain during development. Pain is often treated as a temporary sensory event, but developing neural systems can interpret repeated or intense pain as an organizing signal. That signal may alter synaptic strength, neuronal excitability and communication between brain regions. Over time, these changes could become embedded in circuits that regulate social engagement. The study’s emphasis on E/I balance suggests that developmental pain may produce lasting behavioral effects through measurable changes in network physiology rather than through an unexplained psychological process.

The findings are likely to attract attention because social deficits are difficult to treat and can appear across many neurological and psychiatric conditions. However, DBS is an invasive therapy involving neurosurgical implantation, and the study does not mean that the treatment is ready for routine use in people affected by early-life pain. Translating a circuit-level discovery into a safe human therapy requires extensive work, including confirmation in independent models, determination of the most effective stimulation parameters and careful assessment of possible side effects. The ACC is involved in many functions, so altering its activity could influence emotion, attention or pain perception in unwanted ways.

Even with those limitations, the research offers a potentially powerful framework for future therapies. If social difficulties can be linked to a specific imbalance between excitation and inhibition, treatments might eventually be designed to correct that imbalance with greater precision. DBS is only one possibility. Noninvasive stimulation, pharmacological treatments that selectively influence inhibitory or excitatory signaling, and therapies combining behavioral training with neuromodulation could also emerge from the same biological insight.

The study’s central message is that the developing brain may retain a capacity for repair, even after early adverse experiences have changed its circuitry. By targeting the ACC and restoring the neural balance that supports its function, deep brain stimulation improved social behavior in the reported research. The work does not erase the complexity of developmental pain, but it identifies a concrete biological pathway connecting early injury, altered brain networks and later social difficulties. That connection could help move the field closer to treatments that address not only pain itself, but also the long-term social consequences it can leave behind.

Subject of Research: Deep brain stimulation, early-life pain, social deficits, and excitatory/inhibitory balance in the anterior cingulate cortex

Article Title: Deep brain stimulation ameliorates social deficits from early-life pain by restoring excitatory/inhibitory balance in the anterior cingulate cortex

Article References: Wan, X., Du, T., Yang, D. et al. Deep brain stimulation ameliorates social deficits from early-life pain by restoring excitatory/inhibitory balance in the anterior cingulate cortex. Transl Psychiatry (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-026-04311-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-026-04311-z

Keywords: deep brain stimulation, early-life pain, social deficits, anterior cingulate cortex, excitatory/inhibitory balance, neuroscience, brain stimulation, developmental pain, social behavior

WARSAW, Poland — The Spanish government announced it will allocate between 1.6 billion and 2 billion euros ($1.8 to $2.3 billion) to develop a national military satellite communications constellation that […]

The post Spain commits up to $2.3 billion for national military communications for IRIS² appeared first on SpaceNews.