Science News
‘Life as We Made It’: Evolutionary biologist illuminates how humans have tinkered with evolution over thousands of years
With genetic engineering, humans have recently unleashed a surreal fantasia: pigs that excrete less environment-polluting phosphorus, ducklings hatched from chicken ...
A genetic history: ‘Origin’ book looks at how the Americas were settled
Scientific understanding of the peopling of the Americas is as unsettled as the Western Hemisphere once was. Skeletal remains, cultural ...
Xenotransplanation: Why the first pig-to-human kidney transplant was a momentous event
Surgeons in New York City successfully attached a pig kidney to a human patient and watched the pinkish organ function ...
They replicate and evolve, but are not alive: Fighting viruses challenges our definitions of life
Scientists have argued for hundreds of years over how to classify viruses, says Luis Villarreal, professor emeritus at the University ...
How a fascination with telepathy pseudoscience laid the groundwork for modern brain research
A brush with death led Hans Berger to invent a machine that could eavesdrop on the brain. In 1893, when ...
The twilight zone of sleep: That’s a sweet spot for human creativity
People who recently drifted off into a light sleep later had problem-solving power, scientists report December 8 in Science Advances ...
Climate change-induced droughts and floods put one of the world’s most important staples — rice — in peril
Farmers in China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam — the biggest rice-growing countries — as well as in Nigeria, Africa’s largest ...
‘The notion of humankind’s African origins unifies researchers’: Human evolution is like a braided stream, fossil and DNA evidence suggests
In a field with a reputation for bitter feuds and rivalries, the notion of humankind’s African origins unifies human evolution ...
Ancient humans mated with Neanderthals as recently as 45,000 years ago
Analyses of DNA found in human fossils from around [45,000 years ago] — the oldest known human remains in Europe ...
Toothpaste that can treat peanut allergies? It’s in clinical trials
A New York City–based company has launched a trial to start testing [a new] concept in a small group of ...
20 years after the Human Genome Project: Efforts are underway to capture human genetic diversity and catalog missing DNA
The Human Genome Project — which built the blueprint, called the human reference genome — has changed the way medical ...
Biologist Emily Willingham explores humans’ obsession with animal penises in “Phallacy”
The organ appears in religious texts, laws, daily speech and even in photos sent, often uninvited, to people’s phones. But ...
CRISPR can transform bad fat into good fat, helping us stay lean and fighting diabetes
Too much of the bad white [fat], which stores energy, makes us obese. The brown type burns energy, helping us ...
Dogs don’t seem to care much about human faces, counterintuitive study finds
Dogs’ brains aren’t especially impressed by faces, either those of other dogs, or of people, a new study suggests. People’s brains ...
Genetic engineering reveals how Venus flytrap spots prey, shedding light on plant’s short-term ‘memory’
A Venus flytrap’s short-term “memory” can last about 30 seconds. If an insect taps the plant’s sensitive hairs only once, ...
Puberty resets the brain, giving preteens facing stress and hardship a second chance
A childhood characterized by hardship, negligence or abuse can also alter the neuroendocrine system that regulates how the body responds ...
How one person was spontaneously cured of HIV—and what that may mean in the fight against AIDS
Twice, people infected with HIV have had levels of the virus in their bodies drop to undetectable levels after bone marrow ...
Are facial expressions universal?
Faces depicted in sculptures crafted between 3,500 and 600 years ago in Mexico and Central America convey five varieties of ...
Redrawing the line between life and brain death
Brain death has been a recognized concept in medicine for decades. But there’s a lot of variation in how people ...
In the race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, ethical concerns abound
How do we ethically test it in people? Can people be forced to get the vaccine if they don’t want it? ...
Why haven’t we been contacted by alien civilizations? Maybe because most have extinguished themselves, as we likely will
For some reason, civilization is not a self-perpetuating state of affairs on this planet. And perhaps not on other planets, ...
Ethical pros and cons of infecting healthy volunteers in quest for COVID-19 vaccine
Instead of vaccinating hundreds to thousands of people and waiting to see if they naturally catch the virus, scientists would ...
Asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs created perfect conditions for microbial life to thrive
The massive Chicxulub crater on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula is the fingerprint of a killer, probably responsible for the destruction of ...
‘Overly simplistic’: Women may have been more than just ‘gatherers’ in ancient times, studies suggest
Sexual divisions of labor characterized ancient societies, but were not as rigidly enforced as has often been assumed, [two] new ...
‘The Idea of the Brain’: Book explores the struggle to understand the human brain
Neuroscientists love a good metaphor. Through the years, plumbing, telegraph wires and computers have all been enlisted to help explain ...
Borrowing a trick from cancer cells could be key to improving organ and limb transplants
To help rats adopt transplanted limbs as their own, researchers have harnessed a ruse that cancer cells use to hide ...
Experiments on living brain tissue unearth ‘ethical quandaries’
Live bits of brain look like any other piece of meat — pinkish, solid chunks of neural tissue. But unlike ...
Iraqi excavation rekindles debate over whether Neanderthals buried their dead
The excavation of an adult Neandertal’s partial upper-body skeleton in Iraqi Kurdistan has revived a decades-long debate over whether Neandertals intentionally buried ...
