Museums, libraries, and bookstores are reopening across the United States after a year of lockdown. The start of this cultural reawakening coincided with both the Juneteenth celebration and the first anniversary of one of the greatest anti-racial rallies in American history. As bookstores reopen, several are putting together displays of Black history-themed children’s books. The…
For a good reason, people have turned to the previous experience of influenza pandemics to try to make sense of COVID-19. Influenza and coronavirus have a lot in common regarding how spread by respiratory droplets and the surfaces they land. The respiratory failure of COVID-19 patients echoed in descriptions of H1N1 influenza patients from 1918-19.…
The genes of monkeys, modern humans, and Neanderthals were compared. According to a new analysis, creativity may have been one of the critical reasons Homo sapiens survived and prevailed over similar animals, including Neanderthals and chimps. According to recent research, humans could spread out and conquer the world due to a new DNA alteration (or…
It’s Sunday, February 26, 1984, and you’re watching “Star Wars” (aka “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope”) on CBS like millions of other kids around the country. When Chewbacca comes onscreen, your father says, “Is that Bigfoot?” You manage to say, “No, Dad.” You’ve even told your father about Chewbacca. The action figure…
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…
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…
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…
The original marshmallow check studied whether or not and how youngsters distracted themselves to avoid intake a candy to obtain two anon. Have you ever seen pictures of preschoolers staring with longing at one marshmallow? The likelihood is that you caught a glimpse of the supposed candy check. Since fifty years ago, the experiment design…