How the humble limpet helped humans develop, survive and thrive: Louise Firth/University of Plymouth, Author provided The humble limpet generally doesn’t attract much attention. Most of us remember them from childhood as tenacious little creatures clinging to rocks, impossible to prise off. But this familiar, cone-shaped animal has played an important part in the development …
Curious Kids: why do bats pass diseases to humans?: The greater shortnosed fruit bat. Nuwat Phansuwan/Shutterstock Why do bats pass deadly diseases like ebola to humans? – Sreehari, aged nine, Kerala, India This is a great question – and it’s one that doctors and scientists have been investigating for a while. The reasons bats pass …
AI shop assistants: get ready for a world where you can’t tell humans and chatbots apart: 'The customer is always real.' Octus_Photography I regularly fly with KLM from Minneapolis to New Delhi, and always stop over in Amsterdam. I am frequently in Minneapolis for research and this is my route to go home to take …
Fifty years ago, humans took the first full photo of Earth from space – the climate crisis means it’s time for another: This image of the Earth from a distance, known as the Blue Marble, was taken by Apollo 17 astronauts. NASAMarshall/Flickr, CC BY-SA “Everybody in the world needs to do this. Everybody in the …
Dune: we simulated the desert planet of Arrakis to see if humans could survive there: Dune, the epic series of sci-fi books by Frank Herbert, now turned into a movie of the same name, is set in the far future on the desert planet of Arrakis. Herbert outlined a richly-detailed world that, at first glance, …
A new oral antiviral drug for COVID is being tested in humans – can it make a difference?: Despite the effectiveness of vaccines, we still need drugs to treat COVID. Even people who have been double vaccinated stand a small chance of getting COVID and ending up moderately or even severely ill. There are drugs …
Fossil footprints prove humans populated the Americas thousands of years earlier than we thought: Are these the footprints of the first-known American teen? Matthew Robert Bennett, Author provided Our species began migrating out of Africa around 100,000 years ago. Aside from Antarctica, the Americas were the last continents humans reached, with the early pioneers crossing …
Why animals recognise numbers but only humans can do maths: Everything I Do/Shutterstock Counting feels utterly effortless to adults, who are unlikely to even remember when or how they picked up this useful, apparently automatic skill. Yet when you think about it, counting is a remarkable invention. It helped early humans to trade, apportion food …
When an ancient volcanic ‘supereruption’ caused sudden cooling, early humans got lucky: The Toba eruption left behind a 100km long lake where the volcano had once been. Clive Oppenheimer, Author provided Around 74,000 years ago, a “supereruption” on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, blasted out an estimated 5,000 cubic kilometres of magma. This was the …
When did humans start experimenting with alcohol and drugs?: Nicholas Longrich, Author provided Humans constantly alter the world. We fire fields, turn forests into farms, and breed plants and animals. But humans don’t just reshape our external world – we engineer our internal worlds, and reshape our minds. One way we do this is by …
How forest elephants move depends on water, humans, and also their personality: African forest elephant in Lekoli River, Odzala-Kokoua National Park, Cuvette-Ouest Region, Republic of the Congo. Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images African forest elephants roam the dense rainforests of West and Central Africa where they subsist largely on a diet of fruit. …
Why we dispute ‘Dunbar’s number’ – the claim humans can only maintain 150 friendships: Photobank gallery/Shutterstock Many of us are aware of the claim that humans can maintain no more than 150 friendships. That figure is called “Dunbar’s number” after the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, who first introduced the idea three decades ago. Dunbar claimed …
‘Dog coronavirus found in humans’ – why you shouldn’t worry: Relax, humans! I'm not going to start the next pandemic. Firn/Shutterstock Scientists have found a new canine coronavirus in a handful of people hospitalised with pneumonia. This may sound alarming, but once we unpack it, you will see that there’s no reason to lose any …
Dunbar’s number: why my theory that humans can only maintain 150 friendships has withstood 30 years of scrutiny: Wisiel/Shutterstock Exactly 30 years ago, I was pondering a graph of primate group sizes plotted against the size of their brains: the larger the brain, the larger the group size. I was curious to know what group …
IQ tests: are humans getting smarter?: sun ok/Shutterstock From the algorithms that make our social media accounts function to the sleep-tracking technology in our smartwatches, the world has never seemed so technologically advanced and developed. Which is why it would be easy to assume that with each generation, humans are getting smarter. But is this …
Male fertility: how everyday chemicals are destroying sperm counts in humans and animals: The sperm count of western men is falling at an alarming rate. Komsan Loonprom/Shutterstock Within just a few generations, human sperm counts may decline to levels below those considered adequate for fertility. That’s the alarming claim made in epidemiologist Shanna Swan’s new …
Five ways fish are more like humans than you realise: Xu Wei Chao/Shutterstock You’ve probably heard that fish have a three-second memory, or that they’re incapable of feeling pain. Neither of these statements is true, but it’s telling that these misconceptions don’t crop up for other vertebrates. Perhaps it’s because fish appear so different from …
Why keeping one mature street tree is far better for humans and nature than planting lots of new ones: Thanks to Victorian street planners, many British streets were designed to be full of big trees and, with 84% of the population living in urban areas, most people are more likely to encounter trees in the …