BLOG: Science News reporter Bruce Bower describes how relationship researchers gathered to honor Caryl Rusbult’s influential career after her recent death.

A genetic analysis of a skeleton from an ancient Asian tomb illuminates the spread of Indo-Europeans.

A study of Greek school children indicates that spatial knowledge lies at the root of how youngsters conceptualize time. (p. 12)

Newborn babies readily link specific scents to breast-feeding and favor those smells as toddlers. (p. 12)

She’s the ultimate evolutionary party crasher. Dubbed Ardi, her partial skeleton was unearthed in Ethiopia near the scattered remains of at least 36 of her comrades. Physical anthropologists had known about the discovery of this long-gone gal for around 15 years, but few expected to see the 4.4-million-year-old hell-raiser that was unveiled in 11 scientific papers in October. Like a biker chick strutting into a debutante ball, Ardi brazenly flaunts her nonconformity among more-demure members of the human evolutionary family, known as hominids. She boasts a weird pastiche of anatomical ad... (p. 22)

Hominids displayed advanced organizational thinking almost 800,000 years ago

Copán’s first king may have been part of a colonial expansion by another, distant Maya kingdom.

A new study yields controversial evidence of mass cannibalism in central Europe 7,000 years ago. (p. 10)