If I asked you to name the animal that was most human-like, you’d probably say chimpanzee, right? It’s a good answer: we are close to them on the evolutionary tree, and our genomes are about 95% identical.
But if you limited the comparison to ‘high-level’ behaviors of humans—like feeling empathy, mourning the dead, or cooperating with others—then you’d find a lot of non-primates that are surprisingly similar to us.
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Shaundra Daily builds software that helps kids recognize, and learn from, their emotions. It’s a topic close to her heart: when she was a child, she says, she “didn’t really get emotion.”
Many children with autism struggle with a similar problem: not being able to fully communicate their emotions, or fully understand what others are feeling. Fortunately, scientists like Shaundra are building high-tech tools that can help.
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Ernst Haeckel, one of Darwin’s contemporaries, was a German naturalist, philosopher, physician and extremely talented artist. When Darwin’s On the Origins of Species came out, in 1859, it was a huge success. Still, it was long and dense and had only a few drawings. That might be why, nine years later, Haeckel’s illustrated book on evolution, called The History of Creation was also so well received.
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One hundred million years ago, tiny creatures called coccolithophores were hanging out at the surface of the ocean, soaking up some sun. Then they died, and their calcium carbonate-filled skeletons dropped to the sea floor. Then more died, piling on top of the others and eventually creating a layer of lime mud.
Over time, as the bottom layers of gunk were exposed to more and more pressure, and more and more heat, they turned into the soft, porous rock we know as chalk.
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This week on NOVA’s Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers, they’re profiling Stephon Alexander, a physicist who studies links between the very big (ie, universes) and the very small (ie, neutrinos).
In my latest post, I make a plug for a mind-blowing museum exhibit that helps people understand the relative scale of big things and small things.
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One of the most well known superbugs is MRSA (Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus), which causes painful sores, fever and pneumonia and is impervious to a slew of common drugs. Every year, more than two million MRSAinfections rack up some $4.5 billion in healthcare costs and kill 90,000 people.
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Jean wasn’t kidding—she really did title one of her research papers “Hi, thanks and goodbye.” It was published in 1980, in a scholarly journal called “Language in Society.”
She wanted to know how mothers and fathers might play a role in their children learning the politeness routines of—you guessed it—saying “hi,” “thank you,” and “bye-bye.”
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There’s been a lot of excitement over the past few years about genes linked to brain diseases. You may have heard that people carrying certain variations of the LRRK2 gene, for example, have an increased risk of Parkinson’s disease.
But did you know that gene expression—that is, the translation of DNA into RNA and, eventually, into proteins—can vary quite a bit in different tissues and cell types?
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