This week, the journey to discover how Lucy, the world-famous fossil hominin, died.

By identifying with her death, she became alive for me.

And breaking up the toxic protein plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease.

We reduce the amyloid plaques in the brain of humans with Alzheimer's disease to a very

significant degree. This is the nature podcast for September 1st, 2016. I'm Kerry Smith. And I'm

Madam Levy. We have a slightly abbreviated show for you this week as we squeeze the last drops out of the summer here in London.

We've prepared two segments of freshly cut science and a sprinkling of research highlights to tide you over until next week.

Let's jump straight in.

Here's Adam with a story of a famous fossil and an ancient accident. Lucy might well be the world's most famous fossil. This one-meter-tall hominin was discovered in 1974 near a village called Hadar in Ethiopia.

She's from the species Australopithecus, a relative of humans.

She's helped scientists figure out how our lineage came to walk upright and raise questions about

whether our ancestor spent time in the branches of trees. Now, a team led by John Kaplanman

has been looking at the bones again, using modern scanning

techniques, to see what more insights they could glean about Lucy's life.

But what more could there be to discover about a fossil that's been meticulously studied

for over 40 years?

Our main interest in this was really trying to do things that had not been done before.

So, for example, when Lucy was discovered, CT scanning, cat scanning, had only just been invented.

So when Lucy came stateside for an exhibit that was hosted by the Ethiopian government,

we thought it was a great opportunity then to do the

CT scanning that had never been done on her before so that we could investigate some new

questions about her bones.

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