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Science / Human Behavior

Human evolution is “one of the highest hurdles — if not the highest hurdle — to science education in America,” says Smithsonian's Rick Potts. Here, an early human fossil found in Broken Hill, Zambia.

How to Talk With Evangelicals About Evolution

For two years, researchers from the Smithsonian traveled the country explaining the science of our shared origins

These unusual cats may have some advantages for allergic owners, but to call them hypoallergenic would be a stretch.

There’s No Such Thing as a Hypoallergenic Cat

With its short tight curl, many claim that the Cornish Rex is proof that cats can be allergen-free. Nope

Several views of a fossilized finger bone found Al Wusta site, Saudi Arabia.

New Research

Rare 85,000-year-old Finger Bone Complicates Our Understanding of African Migration

The fossil builds on the theory that humans left Africa in multiple waves, and suggests they made it as far as the Arabian Desert

Primes still have the power to surprise.

Why Prime Numbers Still Surprise and Mystify Mathematicians

2300 years later, new patterns continue to show up in these indivisible tricksters

A whale with water gushing out of its blowhole would not be smiling. It would be drowning.

How Children’s Books Reveal Our Evolving Relationship With Whales

Storybooks feature a fair amount of factual errors—and those errors can be revealing

Jökulsárlón, Iceland

Climate Change Can Also Transform Language

As our world warms, warps and melts, metaphors of the past take on new meaning

Mid-19th Century specimens collected in Latin America by Alfred Russel Wallace include parrot wings and marsupial pelts.

The Great Feather Heist

The curious case of a young American’s brazen raid on a British museum’s priceless collection

These black- and red-colored pigments reveal that humans were using pigments, potentially to communicate status or identity, by around 300,000 years ago.

New Research

Colored Pigments and Complex Tools Suggest Humans Were Trading 100,000 Years Earlier Than Previously Believed

Transformations in climate and landscape may have spurred these key technological innovations

Small differences account for a shooter’s consistency.

The Math Behind the Perfect Free Throw

A basketball computer program simulates millions of trajectories in search of the ideal shot

The Proliferation of Happiness

A professor of consumer culture tracks the history of positive psychology

Human evolution is ongoing, and what we eat is a crucial part of the puzzle.

How Cheese, Wheat and Alcohol Shaped Human Evolution

Over time, diet causes dramatic changes to our anatomy, immune systems and maybe skin color

The trepanated skull of a Neolithic woman. The fact that the hole is rounded off by ingrowth of new bone suggests that the patient survived the operation.

No, Getting a Hole Drilled in Your Head Was Never a Migraine Cure

The ancient and controversial procedure was used for a slew of reasons, but to ‘let the headache out’ was not one of them

At La Pasiega in Spain, the scalariform, or ladder shape, composed of red horizontal and vertical lines (center left) dates to older than 64,000 years.

New Research

Were Neanderthals the Earliest Cave Artists? New Research in Spain Points to the Possibility

Archaeologists pushed back the date of cave paintings at three sites to 65,000 years ago—20,000 years before the arrival of humans in Europe

A team of researchers in northern Australia have documented kites and falcons, “firehawks,” intentionally carrying burning sticks to spread fire: It is just one example of western science catching up to Indigenous Traditional Knowledge.

When Scientists “Discover” What Indigenous People Have Known For Centuries

When it supports their claims, Western scientists value what Traditional Knowledge has to offer. If not, they dismiss it

Low oxygen caused the death of these corals and others in Bocas del Toro, Panama. The dead crabs pictured also succumbed to the loss of dissolved oxygen.

Why Our Oceans Are Starting to Suffocate

A new paper links global warming to diminished oxygen concentrations at sea

This cartoon from Harper's Weekly depicts how opiates were used in the 19th century to help babies cope with teething.

Inside the Story of America’s 19th-Century Opiate Addiction

Doctors then, as now, overprescribed the painkiller to patients in need, and then, as now, government policy had a distinct bias

The book was published so hastily the fuse bomb pictured on the cover was “ticking.”

1968: The Year That Shattered America

The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation

‘The Population Bomb’ made dire predictions—and triggered a wave of repression around the world

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