It's something that many people are self-conscious of, and if you not a fan of your nose, we finally know who to blame. Scientists have revealed that Neanderthal DNA helps dictate the shape of your nose. A new study led by UCL researchers found that a particular gene, which leads to a taller nose, may have been the product of natural selection as ancient humans adapted to colder climates after leaving Africa. Dr Kaustubh Adhikari, who led the study, said: 'In the last 15 years, since the Neanderthal genome has been sequenced, we have been able to learn that our own ancestors apparently interbred with Neanderthals, leaving us with little bits of their DNA. 'Here, we find that some DNA inherited from Neanderthals influences the shape of our faces.

The face of an eight-year-old Neanderthal boy who died more than 30,000 years ago has been reconstructed by scientists who used a skull initially found in the Teshik-Tash cave in Uzbekistan in 1938. The portrait is the first three-dimensional restoration of a Neanderthal skull fossil, which reveals the young boy had a small, turned-up nose that sunk into his face. The fossil is the first Neanderthal fossil discovered in Asia and the only complete Asian Neanderthal skull fossil preserved so far. The team, led by China's Jilin University and Russia's Moscow State University, believes that the restoration shows the facial shape of prehistoric humans in Eurasia and displays the morphological characteristics of Neanderthals in Central Asia. The skull, dubbed Teshik-Tash 1, was found in a shallow pit inside the cave, along with five pairs of Siberian ibex horn cores and bird skeletons.

Welcome to the latest article in TNW's guide to the AI apocalypse. In this series we'll examine some of the most popular doomsday scenarios prognosticated by modern AI experts. It's pretty easy to think up new ways for robots to destroy us. But what if AI doesn't want us dead? Maybe our future overlords will see our weaknesses and, in their infinite benevolence, choose to upgrade us.

A team of researchers hope lab-grown brains from 550,000-year-old Neanderthals will be able to pilot the movements of a crab-like robot. The unbelievable experiment is using Neanderthal DNA to grow pea-sized brains masses, which are hooked-up to robots to test the capabilities of the electrical signals detected within the tissue. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine are simultaneously growing brain tissue from human DNA to plug into the same crab-like machines. They hope the difference in robot movements achieved by the lab-grown brains of modern man and Neanderthals, who diverged from human beings around 550,000 to 765,000 years ago, will offer vital clues about the minds of our early ancestors. The lab-grown brains cannot achieve conscious thoughts or feelings – but can mimic the basic structure of a developed brain, and reveal key differences in how the nerve cells function.

Neanderthals are still affecting what illnesses some people develop, how tall they are and how their immune systems work, despite being extinct for 40,000 years. This is thanks to the Neanderthal DNA those of non-African descent inherited from ancestors who mated with our cousins some 50,000 years ago. A study has now revealed how this genetic legacy is still controlling how some people's genes work, with possible consequences for their health. Tellingly, the Neanderthal influence has waned fastest in parts of the body that evolved most rapidly around that time, especially the brain. It suggests that once our direct human ancestors had evolved the equipment for sophisticated language and problem-solving, mating with Neanderthals – and the DNA that came with it – rapidly fell out of fashion.