Nature or Nurture? It’s All About the Message
Were Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci born brilliant or did they acquire their intelligence through effort? No one knows for sure, but telling people the latter – that hard…
biology
The Games Genes Play: Algorithm Helps Explain Sex in Evolution
What do you get when you mix theorists in computer science with evolutionary biologists? You get an algorithm to explain sex. It turns out that 155 years after Charles Darwin…
From Contemporary Syntax to Human Language’s Deep Origins
On the island of Java, in Indonesia, the silvery gibbon, an endangered primate, lives in the rainforests. In a behavior that’s unusual for a primate, the silvery gibbon sings: It…
Microbes May Drive Evolution of New Animal Species
A little over a year ago, Bordenstein, a biologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and his then-graduate student, Robert Brucker, mated two incompatible species of wasp in the lab,…
Analyzing Sperm Cells to Learn About Animal Infidelity, Evolution
Researchers at the Natural History Museum at University of Oslo, Norway, were among the first in the world to start analyzing sperm cells to learn more about bird evolution and…
Dogs Follow Human Voice Direction to Find Hidden Food
Dogs and puppies are gifted at interpreting human communicative hints, and previous studies showed that they use human visual cues like pointing or gazing in order to find hidden food….