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Life

How a sea anemone grows its tentacles

Creature's cells change shape to form appendages.

Animals

Tongue bristles help bats lap up nectar

High-speed videos capture stretched-out tongue bumps that stretch out so nectar-feeding bats can slurp up their food.

Humans

Greed may breed financial fitness, but evolution allows unselfishness to survive

If greed is good, as Gordon Gekko proclaimed in the 1987 movie Wall Street, then economics ought to be a superlative science. After all, at the core of economic theory sits a greedy idealization of human nature known as Homo economicus. It’s a fictitious species that represents the individual economic agent, motivated by selfishness. H. […]

Earth

Toxic waste sites may cause health problems for millions

Exposures to lead and chromium represent particular problems, study finds in India, Indonesia and Philippines.

Health & Medicine

Gulp

Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach.

Anthropology

Paleofantasy

What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live by Marlene Zuk.

Physics

A Palette of Particles by Jeremy Bernstein

Science & Society

Between Man and Beast

An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure that Took the Victorian World by Storm by Monte Reel.

Science & Society

A Renaissance Globemaker’s Toolbox

Johannes Schöner and the Revolution of Modern Science 1474-1550 by John W. Hessler.

Humans

Human ancestors had taste for meat, brains

A mix of hunting and scavenging fed carnivorous cravings of early Homo species.

Neuroscience

Pieces of Light

How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts by Charles Fernyhough.