All Stories by Bruce Bower
- Life
Male chimps exchange meat for sex
A long-term study of chimps living in western Africa indicates that males hunt down monkeys not only to eat their meat, but also to exchange the meat for sex with female chimps.
- Animals
Chimps ambidextrous when digging wells
A survey of water-collection holes dug on the banks of an African river by wild chimpanzees indicates that, unlike people, these apes don’t have a preference for using either the right or left hand on manual tasks.
- Anthropology
Hobbit brain small, but organized for complex intelligence
Evolution may have endowed a controversial species with small but humanlike brains equipped to support advanced thinking
- Health & Medicine
Autism immerses 2-year-olds in a synchronized world
By age 2, kids with autism focus on synchronized physical events, such as a person’s moving lips accompanied by sounds, rather than on eye movements and other social cues, a new study suggests.
- Health & Medicine
Gestures speak volumes in the brain
A new brain-imaging study suggests that an understanding of spoken language relies on changing sets of brain networks that exploit acoustic and visual cues.
- Animals
Dogs show a fetching communication savvy
In a sign of understanding that one object can be used to represent another, border collies fetch toys after being shown replicas or, in some cases, photos of those toys.
- Psychology
Feelings, universal musical feelings
Africans who spurn all things Western provide evidence that people everywhere recognize expressions of happiness, sadness and fear in music. Listen to some of the audio samples the study used.
- Humans
Radio relief for Rwandans’ social conflicts
Rwandans who listened to a yearlong radio soap opera developed increased tolerance for dissent, a greater sense of cooperation and more acceptance of marriage across ethnic lines.
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Networks of Plunder
Archaeologists tracing the labyrinth of antiquities trafficking hope to shut it down, or at least slow it up.
- Anthropology
Peking Man fossils show their age
Scientists have pushed back the age of Peking Man, raising questions about whether Homo erectus trekked to eastern Asia in two separate migrations.
- Health & Medicine
Early intellectual gap found for kids of older fathers
A reanalysis of data from more than 33,000 U.S. children finds that those with older fathers fared somewhat poorer on intelligence tests than those with younger fathers, regardless of mothers’ ages.
- Archaeology
Horse domestication traced to ancient central Asian culture
New lines of evidence indicate that horses were domesticated for riding and milking more than 5,000 years ago by members of a hunter-gatherer culture in northern Kazakhstan.
