NEW ORLEANS — A relatively small brain can pack a big evolutionary punch. Consider Homo naledi, a famously puzzling fossil…
Humans & Society
Latest stats are just a start in preventing gun injuries in kids
On June 18, 4-year-old Bentley Thomas Koch fatally shot himself in the face. A few weeks earlier, Harmony Warfield, age…
Sound-reflecting shelters inspired ancient rock artists
Ancient rock artists were drawn to echo chambers. Members of early farming communities in Europe painted images in rock-shelters where…
The southern drawl gets deconstructed
BOSTON — Some aspects of speech are as Southern as pecan pie. Consider the vowel shift that makes the word…
The first Cassini to explore Saturn was a person
As the Cassini spacecraft plunges toward its death on Saturn, the world’s knowledge of the famous ringed planet continues to…
Top 10 discoveries about waves
Physics fans are a lot like surfers. Both think waves are really fun. For surfers, it’s all about having a…
Launch your imagination with Science News stories
Imagine for a moment that you lived on another planet. Not Tatooine, Trantor or another fictional orb, but a real-deal…
Running is contagious among those with the competitive bug
People may think they act independently. But we catch social behaviors faster than colds. Whether or not we vote, try…
African farmers’ kids conquer the marshmallow test
Children of Nso farmers in Cameroon know how to master the marshmallow test, which has tempted away the self-control of…
Peru’s plenty brought ancient human migration to a crawl
Some of the earliest settlers of the Americas curtailed their coastal migration to hunker down in what’s now northwestern Peru,…