Lightning strikes may have supplied a key ingredient that allowed life to emerge on the early Earth, according to a new study of "fossilized" lightning.
Move over, fruit flies, rats and zebrafish. Squid and octopuses have elaborate brains and behaviors, and scientists say studying them in the laboratory could yield important biological insights.
Modern birds are dinosaurs without toothy jaws, and with bigger brains. Newly published research fills in some of the missing links in their evolution.
When Turkish children head back to school, something will be missing from their textbooks: any mention of evolution. The government is phasing in what it calls a values-based curriculum.
If we are committed to combatting "alternate facts" in science — as we should be — then we must also combat the alternative theories that license them, says guest blogger Andrew Shtulman.
The brain evolved over evolutionary time scales of millions of years. So what's the likelihood that modern experience could have had an impact? Alva Noë says a new study might give the topic light.
A new study suggests that diet had a big influence in driving the evolution of brain size in primates. Monkeys who thrive on fruit have bigger brains than their plant eating neighbors.
Ants in Fiji farm plants and fertilize them with their poop. And they've been doing this for 3 million years, much longer than humans, who began experimenting with farming about 12,000 years ago.
When humans talk to dogs, the canine brains seem to separate the meaning of the words from the intonation used and to analyze each aspect independently.
Scientists say tiny bones dating back 700,000 years on the Indonesian island of Flores shine new light on how these mysterious, 3-foot-tall creatures got that way.
It's not unusual for males to try to impress females with big body parts. Consider antlers on deer, or elaborate tails on peacocks. Some male fruit flies take a different approach: giant sperm.
The mites that live on our faces may help reveal where our ancestors came from. It wouldn't be the first time that creepy crawlies have revealed something more than skin deep about the human past.
If the holidays have you stressed out, an act of kindness could help. Researchers tracked people and found that stress levels dropped when they went out of their way to help others.
Loneliness takes a toll on many aspects of health, in part because it activates a fight -or-flight immune response. That may have helped ancestors survive lonely exile, but can slowly kill us today.
Humans are pathetic at athletic feats compared to animals. We get outrun by ostriches and outswum by penguins. But human physiology makes us aces at one sport: endurance running. Sorry, horse.
A dragonfly with a 2-foot wingspan? A sloth the size of an elephant? Skunk Bear's latest video introduces the enormous, ancient relatives of modern animals — all in rhyming verse. Of course.
Tigers have round pupils, but domestic cats have vertical slits in the center of their eyes. What gives? A census of the shapes of animals' pupils suggests size and way of life each play a big role.
Eons ago, cabbage butterfly larvae and the plants they eat began an evolutionary arms race. The result: "mustard oil bombs" that give the plants, and condiments we make from them, distinctive flavors.
That's what researchers found when they gave chimps a device that appeared to work like an oven. The findings add to the argument that our ancestors began cooking soon after learning to control fire.
