Extroverted gorillas in captivity outlive their shy brethren, a new study of these great apes in North American zoos and sanctuaries finds. Using methods adapted from studying human personality, keepers, volunteers, researchers and other caretakers gauged 298 individual gorillas’ temperaments. These gorillas were followed over 18 years and their life spans recorded. The results revealed…
Disgust – it’s an emotion we experience when we encounter things that are dirty, impure, or otherwise contaminated. From an evolutionary standpoint, experiencing the intense, visceral sense of revulsion that comes with disgust presumably helps us to avoid contaminants that can make us sick or even kill us. But new research suggests that disgust not…
Egypt is at the crossroads. Its emerging constitution, however, betrays the brightest hopes of the so-called Arab Spring. A draft approved by Egypt’s Constituent Assembly includes blasphemy laws and ignores the rights of women; it even permits child labor. Pray it’s just a rough draft. Citizens have taken to the streets in protest. We can…
One of the many reasons why people fail to acknowledge the seriousness of greenhouse gas emissions is that they’re invisible. You can’t see carbon dioxide piling up on the street; you can only see the disasters that happen in the wake of climate change. A project from Carbon Visuals and the Environmental Defense Fund imbues…
Palaeontologists have found what is likely to be the oldest known dinosaur, filling in a yawning evolutionary gap. A study in Biology Letters describes Nyasasaurus parringtoni, a new species from 10-15 million years before the previous earliest dinosaur specimens. It walked on two legs, measured 2-3m in length with a large tail and weighed between…
On January 1, 2013, the world can go back to emitting greenhouse gases with abandon. The pollution-reduction commitments that nations made as part of the Kyoto Protocol will expire, leaving the planet without any international climate regulation and uncertain prospects for a future treaty. Nature explores the options for limiting — and living with —…
The Dalai Lama recommends a radical new approach: a religionless religion, if you will, stripped of myth, superstition, and narrow dogmatism, and focused on the practical work of transforming human behavior. He wants to incorporate the insights of the hard sciences as well as psychology, philosophy, and sociology into a broad-based new discipline to address…
Political leaders haven’t moved on global warming because they’re not feeling widespread public pressure to do so. And the public isn’t putting that pressure on their leaders in part because many people still don’t believe that climate change is a real, or all that dangerous. The vast, vast majority of climate scientists know that global…
The savannah habitat that sustains African lions has shrunk by 75 percent over the past half-century, according to a study published in the journal Biodiversity and Conservation, a dramatic loss that could threaten the species’ survival. The new analysis by American, African and British researchers — which suggests the continent’s lion population has declined from…
A two-billion-dollar robot scoops up pale-red samples on the surface of Mars to search for chemical clues in the powdery grains of the alien soil. At the same time, British scientists brave a notoriously windswept plain in Antarctica to investigate an ancient lake lying hidden beneath the ice-sheet. The two missions are exploring different planets…