They see facial recognition, smart diapers, and surveillance devices as inevitable evolutions. They’re not. Imagine you’re taking an online business class — the kind where you watch video lectures and then answer questions at the end.

As elite distance swimmer Ben Lecomte approached the edge of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, he started finding more and more of something unexpected — a lot of life.

As elite distance swimmer Ben Lecomte approached the edge of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, he started finding more and more of something unexpected — a lot of life.

The Covid pandemic has already turned life as we know it upside down – and no doubt prompted some people to want to leave the planet. Now a leading scientist has warned that viruses may not only be found on Earth, but might occur – should life exist – elsewhere in the universe.

It has been proposed that humans are now living within a period of the Earth’s history appropriately named ‘The Anthropocene’ (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000).

‘One of their philosophers has lately discovered that “as the liver secretes bile, so does the brain secrete thought”; which astonishing discovery Dr Cabanis, more lately still, in his ‘Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l’Homme’, has pushed into its minutest developments.

Could future humans evolve to have venom glands? In new research, scientists close a long-open door by causally linking early salivary glands with what eventually became venom glands in many animals.

Humans are shaping the evolutionary future of life on Earth.

Animal immune systems depend on white blood cells called macrophages that devour and engulf invaders.

A small shark spots its prey—a meaty, seemingly defenseless octopus. The shark ambushes, and then, in one of the most astonishing sequences in the series Blue Planet II, the octopus escapes. First, it shoves one of its arms into the predator’s vulnerable gills.

Humanity’s transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most important developments in human and Earth history. Human societies, plant and animal populations, the makeup of the atmosphere, even the Earth’s surface – all were irreversibly transformed.

Image by Jamy van Zyl In 1986, Science and Technology Studies scholar Langdon Winner launched a debate about the power of technologies to shape human politics when he asked “do artefacts have politics?” A technology like the Robert Moses-designed overpasses that arc above the roads from New Yor

As a clinical geneticist, Paul James is accustomed to discussing some of the most delicate issues with his patients. But in early 2010, he found himself having a particularly awkward conversation about sex.

In mid-January, a group of computer scientists and biologists from the University of Vermont, Tufts, and Harvard announced that they had created an entirely new life form — xenobots, the world’s first living robots.

Nicola Davis speaks to Prof Jean-Jacques Hublin about new archaeological discoveries which reveal that modern humans co-existed with Neanderthals for several thousand years

https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2020/may/28/when-did-modern-humans-first-arrive-in-europe-podcast

Ask yourself the following: Would you feel confident taking an over-the-counter medication if you were 98 percent sure it would work safely? Would you dare to gamble all your savings in a one-off scheme in which you had a 98 percent chance of losing it all? The coronavirus is a similar no-brainer.

When humans started to tame dogs, cats, sheep, and cattle, they may have continued a tradition that started with a completely different animal: us.

In 2007, Kenneth Stanley, a computer scientist at the University of Central Florida, was playing with Picbreeder, a website he and his students had created, when an alien became a race car and changed his life.

On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch. Humans are now living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. Or so we’re told.

‘Fuck Earth!’ Elon Musk said to me, laughing. ‘Who cares about Earth?’ We were sitting in his cubicle, in the front corner of a large open-plan office at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles. It was a sunny afternoon, a Thursday, one of three designated weekdays Musk spends at SpaceX.