Science

Want to say “Hello,” but don’t know the local language? Try waving your hand. Such gestures, common among humans, are also surprisingly similar among chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest great ape relatives. Now, a new study has identified numerous gestures that mean the same thing to both species. That suggests these signals have biological underpinnings…

Ankylosaurs are odd-looking, even by dinosaur standards: They’re squat and fat, with armored backs and, usually, tail clubs. But for many scientists, there’s another reason these creatures stand out—most are fossilized upside-down. The reason for this strange orientation was a mystery for decades, but thanks to an unusual collaboration between paleontologists and armadillo experts, we…

Even Aristotle, in his classic Rhetoric, writes about the need to persuade the audience that you’re credible (ethos) and appeal to their emotions (pathos), as well as using logical arguments (logos)

It’s not just dads with beer bellies: Many objects in our solar system sport a bulge around their midsections, caused by fast rotations that tend to fling material outward at equatorial latitudes.

In the spring of 2012, while digging a hole for a thermal pool, construction workers in Grosseto, Italy, hit scientific pay dirt: layers of stratified soil and rock filled with prehistoric bones and artifacts close to 171,000 years old. Excavating the pool would have to wait. With further digging, the researchers found tantalizing evidence of…

Sometime this summer, a spacecraft orbiting over the moon’s far side, out of contact with controllers on Earth, will release a lander. The craft will ease to a soft landing just after lunar sunrise on an ancient, table-flat plain about 600 kilometers from the south pole. There, it will unleash a rover into territory never…

If you’re afraid of giant insects, climate change has a silver lining for you. A new study shows that as temperatures have increased over the past century, the world’s biggest beetles may have been shrinking, some downsizing by as much as 20% in 45 years.

The modern world would barely be recognizable to the mammoth and bison herds of ages past. Roads subdivide large stretches of land, and clusters of buildings and people have sprung up nearly everywhere. Indeed, humans have modified the environment so much, they may have cut the distance by which mammals—large and small—roam by some two-thirds,…

ENIGMA, the world’s largest brain mapping project, was “born out of frustration.”