Computers can be our prediction machines.
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Scientists of all kinds turn to computer models to investigate questions they can’t get at any other way. Here’s how models work and why we can trust them.
Research suggests beards evolved to help men impress other men rather than attracting women.
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Do women prefer ‘manly men’ with thick beards and deep voices? Science reveals all.
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Why do we laugh? Evolutionarily speaking, it’s so we could survive – and similar rules apply today.
Bride and groom, 1900-1910.
wikimedia
Researchers show that a sexually transmitted disease similar to gonorrhoea could have got rid of promiscuous behaviour in agricultural societies.
Illustration of ritualised human sacrifice in traditional Hawaiian culture, as documented by the French explorer and artists Jaques Arago in 1819.
Arago, Jacques. (1822). Promenade autour du monde: pendant les années 1817, 1818, 1819 et 1820, sur les corvettes du roi l’Uranie et la Physicienne, commandées par M. Freycinet
Human sacrifice seems horrifying and costly. But there might be a reason so many early human societies practiced it.
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Your attitudes to risk – from extreme sports to school rugby – are hardwired into you.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
The Athenaeum
Most scientists don’t think there’s an inherent conflict between their field and religion, so why do we?
Tricky: The butterfly Kallima inachus resembles a dead leaf.
Swallowtail Garden Seeds/flickr
The natural world is full of trickery and deception in the struggle for survival.
Susan Schmitz / shutterstock
We’ve bred them into all shapes and sizes, but dogs haven’t been around for long enough to have evolved beyond Canis familiaris.
Julian P Guffogg
Most scientists have found a way to make religion and evolution compatible, but not in the way you might think.
Capturing our attention … but at what cost?
catlovers/flickr
We need to spend more time investigating nature’s ‘ordinary Joe’s’.
A male African jacana bird mounts a female, but who takes the lead in caring for the young?.
Shutterstock/Dave Montreuil
Sex roles in nature don’t always follow the same script. In fact, some females have genitals that resemble a penis. How can this be? Evolution has the answers.
You can encounter at least one of the six guineafowl species in sub-Saharan Africa.
Tim Crowe
Africa is traditionally known as the cradle of human-kind. But research shows that it is also the cradle of bird-kind, for gamebirds at least.
DNA.
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Scientists used to think that the 98% of human DNA that didn’t encode proteins was junk. They don’t think that anymore.
A popular theory argues women are unable to have kids late in life in order to care for their grandchildren.
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Not looking forward to the hot flushes associated with menopause? Don’t worry, science suggests there are actually benefits to it.
Do I resemble your great-great-grandfather by any chance?
DaniRevi/pixabay
Why do so many people question evolution and not other scientific theories?
With moralistic gods watching, it’s easier to be fair and cooperative.
Olivier
For human groups to grow from small, intimate communities to the huge interconnected societies we know now, people needed to be willing to cooperate with strangers. Religion might have played a big role.
Just Go for it: programming a computer to play an ancient game.
Donar Reiskoffer/Wikimedia Commons
While it’s impressive, developing a computer to win at Go is not a big step toward the type of artificial intelligence used by the thinking machines we see in the movies.
There seems to be a level of implicit trust between gay men and straight women.
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Research shows that women are especially drawn to gay men in certain contexts.
The annual ‘Living Landscapes’ procession is aimed at raising awareness of the Cedarberg’s KhoiSan cultural heritage.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings
Human population groups worldwide are highly homogeneous genetically. They are in fact 99.5% similar and their anatomical features vary in an uncorrelated fashion over the landscape.