Researchers have finally deciphered a complete human genetic instruction book from cover to cover. The completion of the human genome has been announced a couple of times in the past,…
Category: Humans
North America’s oldest skull surgery dates to at least 3,000 years ago
A man with a hole in his forehead, who was interred in what’s now northwest Alabama between around 3,000 and 5,000 years ago, represents North America’s oldest known case of…
‘Vagina Obscura’ shows how little is known about female biology
Vagina ObscuraRachel E. GrossW.W. Norton & Co., $30 More than 2,000 years ago, Hippocrates, the Greek physician often considered the father of modern medicine, identified what came to be known…
Social mingling shapes how orangutans issue warning calls
Human language, in its many current forms, may owe an evolutionary debt to our distant ape ancestors who sounded off in groups of scattered individuals. Wild orangutans’ social worlds mold…
How I’ll decide when it’s time to ditch my mask
For weeks, I have been watching coronavirus cases drop across the United States. At the same time, cases were heading skyward in many places in Europe, Asia and Oceania. Those…
How gene therapy overcame high-profile failures
Gene therapy pioneer Richard Jude Samulski remembers when he avoided the words “gene therapy.” In the mid-2000s, he told people he worked on “biological nanoparticles,” even attempting to trademark the…
What do we mean by ‘COVID-19 changes your brain’?
Like all writers, I spend large chunks of my time looking for words. When it comes to the ultracomplicated and mysterious brain, I need words that capture nuance and uncertainties.…
Ancient seafarers built the Mediterranean’s largest known sacred pool
On a tiny island off Sicily’s west coast, a huge pool long ago displayed the star-studded reflections of the gods. Scientists have long thought that an ancient rectangular basin, on…
Ancient Homo sapiens took a talent for cultural creativity from Africa to Asia
Creativity runs deep in human evolution. Stone Age people steered their cultures through some inventive twists and turns as far-flung groups of Homo sapiens independently learned to cope with harsh…
The world’s oldest pants stitched together cultures from across Asia
What little rain that falls on a gravelly desert located in western China’s Tarim Basin evaporates as it hits the blistering turf. Here, in this parched wasteland, lie the ancient…
