Ryan Mandelbaum
Challenging evolutionary psychology: Philosopher attacks the field’s underlying scientific foundation
It’s not often that a paper attempts to take down an entire field. Yet, this past January, that’s precisely what ...
Early humans may have mated with Neanderthals and Denisovans a lot more than we thought
Before we became the only remaining humans on the planet, Homo sapiens mated with Neanderthals and the closely related Denisovans. New research is now revealing ...
Tiny, lab-grown brains allow researchers to explore what makes humans different
Researchers are growing human, ape, and monkey brain tissue in the lab in order to understand what makes us different ...
Left-handed? Genes link handedness to language facility but also schizophrenia and anorexia
Despite its ubiquity to the human experience, there are lots of unresolved questions related to handedness, such as how lefty ...
Viewpoint: No, cell phones aren’t causing people to grow horns
You might have heard recently, from publications like the Washington Post, NBC, and of course, Newsweek, that some people are ...
66 million years ago a deadly asteroid struck Earth. Scientists just found a fish killed by the impact
At one of the most important ancient graveyards on Earth in North Dakota, paleontologists unearthed the fossilized remains of fish ...
China’s latest ‘ethical mess’: Cloning diseased gene-edited monkeys
Chinese researchers have cloned five gene-edited monkeys with a host of genetic disease symptoms, according to two scientific papers published ...
Researchers aim to develop heartier potatoes, but ‘generations of inbreeding’ may pose a challenge
Scientists are trying to revolutionize potatoes and....cure the tubers’ depression, the result of generations of inbreeding. ....Potatoes reproduce through cloning, ...
Spicy tomatoes? Scientists want to produce chili pepper metabolites in CRISPR-edited tomatoes
Surely, someone out there has cooked up a shrimp fra diavolo and thought, “mamma mia, this would be much easier ...
Mitochondrial DNA can be passed on from fathers, too
You probably learned two things about mitochondria in high school biology. First, they’re the powerhouses of the cell. Second, you ...
Three bird species in one? Inside a warbler’s puzzling DNA
A Pennsylvania birder spotted the bird of a lifetime in his backyard this past spring—it was a hybrid of three ...
Search for extraterrestrial life could be hampered by drama surrounding NASA’s telescope dreams
For nearly 20 years, NASA has been planning and constructing a telescope unlike any ever built before: the James Webb ...
Astronomical cycles may have influenced animal evolution on Earth
A team of researchers from the United States and New Zealand took a look at how likely species were to ...
‘Awakened’ vegetative man shows how viral stories raise false hopes
A man recently “woke” from a vegetative state, crying again after “regaining consciousness,” creating a flurry of news coverage. Yet as exciting ...
Tuberculosis-resistant cows developed using CRISPR gene editing by Chinese scientists
Tuberculosis has long been a problem for cattle farmers in developing countries, especially in Asia and Africa. Now, scientists from ...
‘Brain blobs’ genetically engineered from stem cells can track effects of Zika virus
[C]ombined with gene editing techniques like CRISPR, it seems like there’s almost nothing you can’t just whip up in a ...
