From wolf rival to human companion, Canis lupus familiaris has mastered empathy, communication, and survival by being the friendliest predator of all.
Tag: evolution
Artificial intelligence is now able to secretly pursue its own goals and hide its intents. How dangerous are these so-called treacherous “AI agents”?
Holidays are a time for family, and grandparents play a role too. Argentine journalist Ignacio Pereyra asks what happens when there are no grandparents around, and asks a grandmother to share her thoughts too.
Both pessimism and optimism are stored in our genes: They helped us be watchful, while giving us the possibility to hope for a better future. But which one helps us lead a better life? For Die Zeit, Harald Martenstein, a self-declared pessimist, looks at the benefits of both.
Have you ever been torn between two emotions and don’t know why? Research is uncovering how your brain can cause you experience two conflicting emotions at the same time.
As the world’s climate becomes erratic and hostile, we might remold our cities from being expressions of our cold triumphalism to vessels and tools for inclusive, peaceful cohabitation with nature.
From the work of Dostoevsky, all the way to modern-day psychology’s concept of resilience, the idea that human beings can adapt to any event or situation persists in popular thought. But biology and history itself show it’s not quite the case.
Many people assume the patriarchy has always been there, but how did it really originate? History shows us that there can be another way.
We’re nearly two years into a global pandemic that has seemingly changed everything in our economy from how we shop to where we eat. COVID-19 indeed may transform our economic lives entirely – except how we work.
Technological progressions have always changed how we behave. But AI has much more far-reaching potential to change the very meaning of what it is to be a human.
As people continue to push the boundaries in areas like AI and biotechnology, it’s worth asking what all these advances will do to our minds and bodies.
LAUSANNE — Is wildlife a world of bullies? We like to imagine the relationships among living beings as a no-holds-barred struggle for survival, a twisted vision of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, conveyed by the political and economic doctrine of social Darwinism. And yet, examples of cooperation abound in the animal world. Mammals, insects and […]
MUNICH — The field of epigenetics is being lauded for its discoveries, which some describe as revolutionary. There’s talk of a wide range of scientific textbooks being rewritten. But are the findings really that groundbreaking? First, what is epigenetics? It is any additional information that gets tacked on top of the genome. Epigenetics refer to […]
An artist duo from Zurich is using sex-talk avatars to pose some burning questions about the future of human-computer relationships.
BOGOTÁ — In a kind of eerie, Darwinian evolution, abandoned pets in parts of Colombia have become feral beasts and predators that are proving more fearsome than wild animals. Once again, wildlife is proving defenseless in the face of yet another man-made threat, produced in this case by former owners of an unwanted dog or […]
PARIS — In today’s globalized automotive market, the average driver has two dreams: to purchase an SUV, and to switch from a manual to an automatic transmission. Used by just about everyone in the United States, Japan and China, this transmission mode is gaining ground in Europe and is set to takeoff in India and […]
Rich in counterintuitive observations, the study of evolution is often misunderstood. We focus here on widespread ideas that happen to be patently false.
Of all the milestones along the road to human civilization, none is more profound than the advent of reading and writing. But in the name of interactivity, the 21st century is marked by the shallow language of social media that risks burning all our acqui
Remember Gattaca? The superb film describes the contrasting fates of two brothers, one of whom was genetically optimized at birth. A few years later, in another movie, The Island, a community of prisoners discovers one day they are nothing but clones of super-privileged people and that their sole purpose is to provide fresh organs as […]
Stories for humans, like water for fish…
Bags, pouches and purses are among the world’s oldest fashion items, used through the ages for carrying seeds, weapons and eyeliner. A history of this most indispensable adornment.
Gender, virility, violence and fear: warmaking has long been thought to have a very specific and masculine identity. But a French researcher has shown that it’s not so simple.
Looking at the business fundamentals, there are both very good and very bad signs for Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella. Is there a (positive) lesson in IBM’s evolution?
As demand for organ transplants skyrockets, a new artificial heart and other sophisticated prostheses are among the medical-tech advancements raising troubling questions.
BERLIN – How fast is evolution? Pretty fast, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Tulsa published in the scientific journal Current Biology. An estimated 80 million birds are killed by cars each year. In Europe too, millions of birds die the same way. But over the past 30 years, the […]
BERLIN – It is a scientific theory of longevity that has the whiff of homemade pie: people live longer thanks to the grandmothers who help raise them. Though first put forth more than a half-century ago, the “grandmother hypothesis” has gotten renewed attention with a recent study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society […]
For many researchers, one measure of intelligence is the ratio of brain size to body weight. But that would mean that the tiny mammal known as the shrew would be capable of great intellectual accomplishments, which it is not presently known for. Why is this? A human brain weighs 1.3 to 1.5 kilos (2.9 to […]