A study of hundreds of years of family trees suggests a man's genes play a role in him having sons or daughters. Men inherit a tendency to have more sons or more daughters from their parents. This means that a

Dinosaur hunters on a month-long expedition to the Sahara desert have returned home in time for Christmas with more than they ever dreamed of finding.

An orangutan's spontaneous whistling is providing scientists at Great Ape Trust of Iowa new insights into the evolution of speech and learning.

Passage graves are mysterious barrows from the Stone Age. New research indicates that the Stone Age graves' orientation in the landscape could have an astronomical explanation. The Danish passage graves are most likely oriented according to the path of the

Two economists have created a new data set that enables them to explain differences in countries' incomes based on their people's ancestral histories. They find that where the ancestors of a country's present population lived some 500 years ago is

The redox-active pigments responsible for the blue-green stain of the mucus that clogs the lungs of children and adults with cystic fibrosis are primarily signaling molecules that allow large clusters of the opportunistic infection agent, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, to organize themselves

For years, scientists have wondered why only males of the rarely seen family of beaked whales have "tusks," since they are squid-eaters and in many of the species, these elaborately modified teeth seem to actually interfere with feeding.

A new investigation could end many of the speculations about the works of El Greco and the man himself. A hand-written annotation to a book, similar to the glosses of Saint Emilianus, found in Spain in a copy of Lives

While life on Earth didn't originate from a blueprint, researchers are avidly working to uncover the basic architecture of living things. One researcher has now developed novel technologies that have enabled him to examine how proteins interact within cells.

Evolutionary geneticists have published a ground-breaking study that characterizes the common ancestor of all life on earth, LUCA (last universal common ancestor). Their findings show that the 3.8-billion-year-old organism was not the creature usually imagined.

The common wisdom is that the invention of the steam engine and the advent of the coal-fueled industrial age marked the beginning of human influence on global climate.

Fossilized skeletons resembling a mythical 'hobbit' creature represent an entirely new species in humanity's evolutionary chain, according to researchers. Cutting-edge 3D modeling technology was used to connect the fossilized hominid skeletons of the so-called "hobbit people," or Homo floresiensis to

Archaeologists have discovered the earliest evidence of our cave-dwelling human ancestors at the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa.

The power of viruses is well documented in human history. Swarms of little viral Davids have repeatedly laid low the great Goliaths of human civilization, most famously in the devastating pandemics that swept the New World during European conquest and

A University of Montreal researcher has studied exchange rituals and comments on three obligations that structure any society: giving, receiving and reciprocating.

With the aid of a straightforward experiment, researchers have provided some clues to one of biology's most complex questions: how ancient organic molecules came together to form the basis of life.

Nearly 50 years after one of the most controversial behavioral experiments in history, a social psychologist has found that people are still just as willing to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks to others when urged on by

How do we make proper movements? A new study in Psychological Science suggests that when we see an object, a number of motor programs in the brain are involuntarily activated (each with a different potential movement we can make), which

To whom would you rather give money: a needy person in your neighborhood or a needy person in a foreign country? If you're a man, you're more likely to give to the person closest to you -- that is, the

In everyday social exchanges, being mean to people has a lot more impact than being nice, research has shown. Feeling slighted can have a bigger difference on how a person responds than being the recipient of perceived generosity, even if