A two-million-year-old partial skull of the extinct baboon Papio angusticeps has been unearthed at Malapa, in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, by a team of scientists headed by Dr Christopher Gilbert of Hunter College of the City University of New York. The specimen, according to the team, represents both the earliest baboon ever found and the only non-hominin…
Male? Female? The distinction is not always clear. Exploring the scientific evidence for the biological origins of sexual orientation and gender identity must continue to both enhance patient care and fight discrimination. People often are unaware of the biological complexity of sex and gender, says Eric Vilain, MD (RES ’98, FEL ’99), PhD, director of the Center for Gender-Based Biology…
Tracking mobile phone data is often associated with privacy issues, but these vast datasets could be the key to understanding how infectious diseases are spread seasonally, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Princeton University and Harvard University researchers used anonymous mobile phone records for more than 15 million people to track the…
We are creatures of habit, nearly mindlessly executing routine after routine. Some habits we feel good about; others, less so. Habits are, after all, thought to be driven by reward-seeking mechanisms that are built into the brain. It turns out, however, that the brain’s habit-forming circuits may also be wired for efficiency. New research from MIT shows that habit formation,…
“War—what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Say it again.” So runs the 1970 pop song that Edwin Starr made famous and that’s now the obligatory soundtrack for every documentary about the Vietnam antiwar movement. For the historians, anthropologists and economists who study warfare, it’s more complicated than that. The sheer ubiquity of war across time and place suggest that it must…
Male and female brains operate differently at a molecular level, a Northwestern University research team reports in a new study of a brain region involved in learning and memory, responses to stress and epilepsy. Many brain disorders vary between the sexes, but how biology and culture contribute to these differences has been unclear. Now Northwestern neuroscientists have found an intrinsic…