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As farmers in the United States slog through the country’s largest drought in 50 years, a lot of people are asking about the connection between global warming and the arid landscape in the Midwest. Is climate change causing this drought? Didn’t the United States suffer worse droughts in the past? And what will happen if…
In a new study, one-year old infants were monitored to determine whether or not they would be able to identify that speech can communicate both observable and unobservable items.
The famous biologist Stephen J. Gould once asked: If we rerun the tape of life, would the outcome of evolution be the same? For years, scientists have questioned whether evolution is predictable, or whether chance events make such predictability unlikely. A study published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that…
For several days in July, Greenland’s surface ice cover melted over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations. Nearly the entire ice cover of Greenland, from its thin, low-lying coastal edges to its 2-mile-thick center, experienced some degree of melting at its surface, according to measurements from…
A race to unlock genetic clues behind living to 100 is set to begin next year, after a US team announced it will compete for the $10 million Genomics X Prize. Genetic entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg is entering the challenge to identify genes linked to a long, healthy life. His team – and any other contenders…
Until the 1990s, the orphanages of Romania were notorious for their harsh, overcrowded conditions. Those perceptions have been borne out in new research that finds growing up in such an environment can change the brain for good. Institutionalization in early childhood can alter a child’s brain and behavior in the long run, the research finds….
Given the dramatic difference in the size and sequence of the human X and Y chromosomes, it’s hard to imagine that they were once a perfect matching pair. But in fact all sex chromosomes start out that way. New research published in Science examines the early phase of sex chromosome evolution in a strain of…
Global comparisons of scientific output are commonplace. As non-experts, policymakers and administrators must rely on indexes of impact and recognition — counts of published papers and citations, and the prestige of source journals — to assess the impact of public spending and to allocate research funds. The gold standard is the Scientific Citation Index Expanded,…
Polar and brown bears diverged between 4 million and 5 million years ago, but they continued to interbreed when the climate warmed. Now, there is evidence that it is happening again.
It’s assumed that modern humans, Homo sapiens, originated in Africa sometime between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago. But paleoanthropologist Tim Weaver argues there might be another way to interpret our species’ beginnings. Instead of a discrete origin event, he suggests in the Journal of Human Evolution that our ancestors’ arrival into the world might have…