And why it’s harder than you might think to evolve knees ..read more

Until a few years ago, it was impossible to create new lager beer ..read more

Research has shown cats become distressed and want more attention when a fellow pet dies ..read more

New research reveals that the human heart has evolved distinct structural and functional traits that set it apart from our closest great ape relatives ..read more

Organoids of mammary glands can help researchers more efficiently study lactation, with findings that could apply to fields ranging from agriculture to medicine ..read more

Reduced to its essence, the process of natural selection would look a lot like play ..read more

‘Road ecology’ is the focus of Crossings, a powerful new book by environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb ..read more

Elephants may have large brains but they are outliers. SiljeAO Scientists have long believed that, generally speaking, the bigger an animal is, the bigger its brain. But our recent study challenges the nature of that linear view and reveals new insights about how brain size and body size have evolved together. There is astounding diversity in the shape, size and internal structure of the brain among different animals. While the size of the brain usually correlates with cognitive abilities, its variation is strongly linked to the size of the animal itself. As an animal gets larger, its brain si ..read more

Photomicrograph of a chondrite meteorite. Francisco Testa/From the author's personal collection Apart from the Sun, its planets and their moons, our Solar System has vast amounts of space rocks – fragments left over from the formation of the inner planets. A large concentration of asteroids forms a vast ring around our Sun, orbiting it between Mars and Jupiter. Fittingly, it’s called the main asteroid belt. Comets are icy bodies of dust and rocks that originated even farther away – in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune and the Oort Cloud of debris surrounding the Solar System. Extraterrestrial roc ..read more

Shot4Sell/Shutterstock Why did the experience of consciousness evolve from our underlying brain physiology? Despite being a vibrant area of neuroscience, current research on consciousness is characterised by disagreement and controversy – with several rival theories in contention. A recent scoping review of over 1,000 articles identified over 20 different theoretical accounts. Philosophers like David Chalmers argue that no single scientific theory can truly explain consciousness. We define consciousness as embodied subjective awareness, including self awareness. In a recent article published i ..read more