When three species of human ancestor walked the Earth

Homo erectus word cloud (stock image).Credit: © ibreakstock / Adobe Stock An international team, including Arizona State University researcher Gary Schwartz, have unearthed the earliest known skull of Homo erectus, the first of our ancestors to be nearly human-like in their anatomy and aspects of their behavior.advertisement Years of painstaking excavation at the fossil-rich site of Drimolen, nestled […]

Surprising research: Prehistoric hyenas and humans share migration patterns

Prehistoric humans left Africa for the first time about 2 million years ago. The research community has been aware of this for some time. Now, novel research reveals that hyenas apparently did the same thing.advertisement ‘Our new study shows that prehistoric humans and hyenas left Africa at approximately the same time. And like humans, spotted […]

Preventing spread of SARS coronavirus-2 in humans

Virus illustration (stock image).Credit: © solvod / Adobe Stock Several coronaviruses circulate worldwide and constantly infect humans, which normally caused only mild respiratory disease. Currently, however, we are witnessing a worldwide spread of a new coronavirus with more than 90,000 confirmed cases and over 3,000 deaths. The new virus has been named SARS coronavirus-2 and has […]

Noises from human activity may threaten New England’s freshwater soundscape

Sounds produced by human activities — anthropogenic sounds — account for more than 90 percent of the underwater soundscape in major freshwater habitats of New England. Rodney Rountree of The Fish Listener in Massachusetts, and Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Victoria, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on March 18, […]

Wildness in urban parks important for human well-being

As metropolises balloon with growth and sprawl widens the footprint of cities around the world, access to nature for people living in urban areas is becoming harder to find.advertisement If you’re lucky, a pocket park might be installed next to a new condominium complex on your block, or perhaps a green roof tops the building […]

CRISPR gene cuts may offer new way to chart human genome

Gene manipulation concept photo illustration (stock image).Credit: © vchalup / Adobe Stock In search of new ways to sequence human genomes and read critical alterations in DNA, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have successfully used the gene cutting tool CRISPR to make cuts in DNA around lengthy tumor genes, which can be used to […]

Earliest interbreeding event between ancient human populations discovered

Neanderthal and modern human skulls (stock image).Credit: © Bruder / Adobe Stock For three years, anthropologist Alan Rogers has attempted to solve an evolutionary puzzle. His research untangles millions of years of human evolution by analyzing DNA strands from ancient human species known as hominins. Like many evolutionary geneticists, Rogers compares hominin genomes looking for genetic […]

Methane emitted by humans vastly underestimated

Methane molecules illustration (stock image).Credit: © vchalup / Adobe Stock Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and large contributor to global warming. Methane emissions to the atmosphere have increased by approximately 150 percent over the past three centuries, but it has been difficult for researchers to determine exactly where these emissions originate; heat-trapping gases like methane […]

First treatment for pain using human stem cells a success

Researchers at the University of Sydney have used human stem cells to make pain-killing neurons that provide lasting relief in mice, without side effects, in a single treatment.advertisement The next step is to perform extensive safety tests in rodents and pigs, and then move to human patients suffering chronic pain within the next five years. […]

New dog, old tricks? Stray dogs can understand human cues

If you have a dog, hopefully you’re lucky enough to know that they are highly attuned to their owners and can readily understand a wide range of commands and gestures. But are these abilities innate or are they exclusively learned through training?advertisement To find out, a new study in Frontiers in Psychologyinvestigated whether untrained stray dogs […]