Enlarge / In the case of the samoyed, selection for physical characteristics produced a dog that sure looks happy. (credit: Zhao Hui) Many dog breeds are purely about appearance—think poodles and the Pekingese. But plenty of other breeds are devoted to specific tasks, like racing greyhounds. For many of these tasks, physical appearance isn’t enough: […]
Produced and directed by Corey Eisenstein. Click here for transcript. (video link) After spending three episodes looking to the heavens—first at dark matter, then Mars, then black holes—our intrepid host Paul Sutter now turns his gaze to a more terrestrial topic: Why are we here? And I don’t mean in a Nietzschean sense (and if […]
Enlarge (credit: Júlia d’Oliveira) They were the largest land creatures the Earth has ever known. But what survived millions of years of fossilization in one specific area of the Ponte Alta region of Brazil was not their massive bones, rather, it was their rare and relatively tiny eggs. And many of them! The first titanosaur […]
Enlarge / Meet Big John. (credit: Zoic Limited Liability Company) It’s difficult to tell which feature of the triceratops is more striking: the two large horns that jut from its forehead or the large frill that extends out from the back of its skull. In the minds of many paleontologists, the two features appear to […]
Two notebooks belonging to Charles Darwin, one of which contains his iconic 1837 “Tree of Life” sketch, have been safely returned to Cambridge University Library, more than two decades after first being reported missing. Twenty years ago, two small notebooks written by 19th-century naturalist Charles Darwin mysteriously disappeared from the archives of Cambridge University Library. One […]
Enlarge / Don’t bother me, I’m busy evolving. (credit: Indrek Lainjärv / EyeEm) When we think of evolution, we often think of slow, gradual changes made over millions of years. However, new research suggests that the process could be happening quite quickly, driving major changes over the course of a single year in response to […]
Enlarge / Don’t bother me, I’m busy evolving. (credit: Indrek Lainjärv / EyeEm) When we think of evolution, we often think of slow, gradual changes made over millions of years. However, new research suggests that the process could be happening quite quickly, driving major changes over the course of a single year in response to […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) Prior to the pandemic, the opposition to vaccines was apolitical. The true believers were a small population and confined to the fringes of both major parties, with no significant representation in the political mainstream. But over the past year, political opposition to vaccine mandates has solidified, with a steady stream of […]
Enlarge (credit: Natalie Fobes | Getty Images) Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates. “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages,” he wrote in On the Origin […]
Enlarge (credit: Kryssia Campos | Getty Images) Twenty-four years ago, Briana Pobiner reached into the north Kenyan soil and put her hands on bones that had last been touched 1.5 million years ago. Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist, was digging up ancient animal bones and searching for cuts and dents, signs that they had been butchered by […]