After a long day in the woods, the diminishing sun beat down on our shoulders. We laboured over shovels and dug with our bare hands to remove the sand, tired. We were researching in the center of the Navajo Nation, in the center of dinosaur country on the Colorado Plateau of northern Arizona, to ascertain…
Machine-learning algorithms can analyze thousands of hours of real soundscapes in a matter of seconds. We will learn a lot about nature if we pay more attention to it, and scientists worldwide are doing precisely that. Biologists are gradually placing audio recording devices on mountain tops and ocean depths to listen in on the groans,…
Researchers collected DNA from more than a million-year-old fossil, shedding light on the woolly mammoth and Columbian mammoth roots. Scientists have recovered DNA from more than a million-year-old mammoth fossil discovered in Siberian permafrost. This DNA, the oldest genetic evidence found to date, sheds light on the evolutionary origins of woolly and Columbian mammoths. It…
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our genus, Homo sapiens, originated in Africa. From there, early humans marched in the footsteps of other species of humans, including Homo erectus, Neandertals, Denisovans, and others, as they migrated across the globe. However, the first H. sapiens to set foot in the Americas did so in a place…
From late May to early July, an international team of students, paleoanthropologists, geologists, and faunal experts fly to Drimolen, a chain of caves situated north of Johannesburg in South Africa and inside the “Cradle of Humankind.” Every year, this fossil excavation team, of which I am a member, arrives with revived hope of unearthing intact…
Since we perceive and sense things as people, we realize we are alive. On the other hand, scientists and great philosophers are stumped into what consciousness is and from where it comes. “Consciousness — or, to put it another way, conscious perception — is clearly a part of reality,” said Johannes Kleiner, a mathematician and…
Whose animal has the most genetic diversity? A butterfly with 20 different colours? A bacterium that divides every 20 minutes and accumulates genetic mutations? It turns out that the new record holder is a fungus that grows on decayed wood. On the other hand, the genetic diversity of the lynx is minimal. That’s terrible news…
In 1697, a lawyer in Lille, France, wrote to his cousin in the Netherlands, requesting a death certificate for a relative, presumably to finalize an inheritance. He folded and sealed his mundane massive to be mailed to the Hague without an envelope. It never made it to its intended recipient for whatever reason and is…
My students and collaborators are planning a scientific conference for my 60th birthday, which will take place in about a year. “I have learned even more from my professors, more from my friends, and also the most from my students,” Rabbi Hanina said. We were all once students. Many of us have cuts and bruises…
Charles Marshall had been bugging his paleontologist colleagues with this question for years before he eventually collaborated with his students to find an answer. The team discovered, which will be published in the journal Science this week, is that about 20,000 adult T. rexes lived at any given time, give or take a factor of…