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Bad decision: Did your genes make you do it?
Studies have picked out groups of genes associated with intelligence, academic achievement, criminal activity and other life outcomes. It now ...
Did Neanderthals have their own language?
Did Neanderthals have language? Before trying to answer that, I should admit my bias: I’m team Neanderthal. As an anthropologist ...
CRISPR gene editing could save pigs from devastating disease
As flu season rears its ugly head, humans aren’t the only ones on the virus’ warpath. Pigs are also vulnerable ...
DNA of God: Did humans evolve a need for religion?
[H]ow does evolution explain religion? Leading scholars propose a two-phase hypothesis (here, here): First, our ancestors evolved certain mental abilities, useful ...
Is there a link between climate change and human evolution?
[W]hile all the talk nowadays focuses on how to change the course of the climate’s evolution, a study out [October 11] ...
Fear-free life? Removing a part of your brain could make it possible—in theory
Brain surgery is not usually something that people actively seek out. However, there may be an exception: the idea of ...
Deep space travelers could face ‘significant’ gastrointestinal damage from radiation
Deep-space travel could even cause significant gastrointestinal (GI) damage to astronauts, according to one new study. Researchers at Georgetown University ...
Mushrooms protect honey bee from disease-carrying Varroa mite, study shows
It’s not easy being a bee these days. Apis mellifera, the Western honey bee, is crucial to agriculture worldwide but faces ...
Are mental disorders linked to the tweaking of genes in human evolution?
The same recent evolutionary changes that make humans prone to bad backs and impacted wisdom teeth may also tweak genes ...
Jack of all environments: Is this why Homo sapiens survived and thrived?
When paleoanthropologists and archaeologists define what makes our species unique, they usually focus on our use of symbolism and language, ...
What genetics tell us about the evolution of wolves to dogs
Who’s a good dog? The very first dogs, apparently, as a new genetic study reveals the sequence of events, begun ...
Making a ‘monster’ with artificial intelligence—on purpose
Researchers at MIT have created a psychopath. They call him Norman. He’s a computer. Actually, that’s not really right. Though ...
‘Absolutely no evidence’ that power leads to brain damage
An Atlantic article from July 2017 has been widely discussed on Twitter over the past few days. It’s called Power Causes Brain Damage ...
Humans have always been overwhelmingly right-handed. We still aren’t sure why.
Nine out of 10 humans are considered right-handed. “It doesn’t matter where you find them, humans have that ratio,” says ...
Viewpoint: Slug ‘memory transfer’ study may be too good to be true
A study claiming that a “memory” could be transferred from one animal to another in form of an injection has ...
Not a nightmare: It’s possible to sweat blood
A medical case report in the Canadian Medical Association Journal from Italian researchers last year details a 21-year-old patient who began mysteriously sweating ...
Recording brain activity gets easier with novel device
An improved method for recording brain activity could prove a major asset to neuroscience, according to a Nature paper just out: Moving magnetoencephalography ...
Recording and playing back dreams isn’t here yet, but may be on the way
[W]hat if you could record your dreams, and play them back for analysis, or even share them with friends? Theoretically, ...
Evolution may be tough to predict, but it’s not random
Can we predict the course evolution will take? That’s the question an international team of researchers decided to tackle, using ...
Popular Cavendish banana heading towards extinction, with GMO and gene edited varieties only viable saviors
We are in the age of the Cavendish, a banana cultivar that accounts for 99 percent of imports to the Western world. But ...
New ‘curvature blindness’ optical illusion illustrates how the brain interprets images
A new optical illusion has been discovered, and it’s really quite striking. The strange effect is called the ‘curvature blindness’ ...
High IQ and health: Are more Intelligent people more prone to illnesses?
A new paper claims that very intelligent people are more prone to mental illnesses and allergies. Mensans reported levels of illness higher ...
Preserved fatty tissues found in 48-million-year-old bird fossil
[R]esearchers have confirmed that fatty tissues were still identifiable in the partial fossil of a 48-million-year-old bird. The new research hints ...
Why the quest for artificial intelligence almost died in infancy
It feels as if we’re riding the wave of a novel technological era, but the current rise in neural networks ...
Oldest African DNA found in Malawi cave fills some of human ancestry’s ‘crucial gaps’
A great irony about Africa is that, even though it’s the birthplace of our species, we know almost nothing about ...
Human Project: 10,000 New Yorkers’ health to be tracked over 20 years
If you smoke cigarettes, you’re putting yourself at a heightened risk for heart disease. That correlation is well-known and unchallenged ...
Fighting the common cold: Understanding rare genetic mutation may be key
A rare mutation that nearly killed a young girl has revealed insights into the common cold. Researchers from the National Institute ...
What if we find an alien civilization 500 years behind us in technology and advancements?
We couldn’t communicate with them by any currently known method. Unless physicists make some kind of wildly unanticipated new discovery, ...
