Apr 3, 2014 | Health, Life & Non-humans
Andalusian researchers, led by the University of Granada, have discovered a curious characteristic of the members of the human lineage, classed as the genus Homo: they are the only primates where, throughout their 2.5-million year history, the size of their teeth has...
Mar 12, 2014 | Brain & Behavior, Life & Non-humans
In their latest study about empathy, Yerkes National Primate Research Center researchers Matthew Campbell, PhD, and Frans de Waal, PhD, have shown chimpanzees exhibit flexibility in their empathy, just as humans do. These findings, which appear in the current issue of...
Feb 28, 2014 | Life & Non-humans
It may seem like mosquitoes will bite anything with a pulse, but they’re actually quite strategic in picking their victims. A new study from The Rockefeller University looked at the interaction of different sensory cues — carbon dioxide, heat and odor — that attract...
Feb 3, 2014 | Brain & Behavior, Health
Human beings are emotional creatures whose state of mind can usually be observed through their facial expressions. A commonly-held belief, first proposed by Dr Paul Ekman, posits there are six basic emotions which are universally recognised and easily interpreted...
Jan 29, 2014 | Brain & Behavior
It’s generally reckoned that early man “discovered” fire somewhere around a million years ago, but it’s still unclear when he began to control and use it. Chiming in, scientists from Israel have found in the so-called Qesem Cave the earliest...
Dec 18, 2013 | Brain & Behavior, Life & Non-humans
Humans have specific brain mechanisms involved in face processing, which focuses attention to faces and recognizes the identity of faces remarkably quickly and accurately. So far the specialized skill for recognizing facial features holistically has been assumed to be...
Dec 11, 2013 | Health, Life & Non-humans
We humans get weaker as we age, and then finally we die. That’s not normal across all species, and in fact some organisms don’t seem to age at all. That’s what a new study has found this week, as published in Nature. It compares aging patterns of...
Dec 6, 2013 | Health, Life & Non-humans
Despite widespread fascination with sharks, the world’s oldest ocean predators have long been a genetic mystery. The first deep dive into a great white shark’s genetic code has fished up big surprises behind a design so effective it has barely changed since before...
Dec 3, 2013 | Life & Non-humans
Scientists have found that Neanderthals organized their living spaces in ways that would be familiar to modern humans, a discovery that once again shows similarities between these two close cousins. The findings, published in the latest edition of the Canadian Journal...
Nov 26, 2013 | Brain & Behavior, Health, Technology
Humankind has a weight problem – and not only in industrialized nations: The growing prosperity in many Asian or Latin American countries goes hand in hand with a way of life that quite literally has hefty consequences. According to the WHO, over half the population...
