Science

The sea robin has fascinated scientists for decades. It has the body of a fish, the wings of a bird and the legs of a crab. “Legs on a fish sound like, um, well, that’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen,” said David Kingsley, a developmental biologist at …

In the 1960s, Jane Goodall started spending weeks at a time in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania watching chimpanzees. One of her most important discoveries was that the apes regularly made gestures to one another. Male chimpanzees tipped their heads up as a threat, for example, while mothers motioned …

The human brain, more than any other attribute, sets our species apart. Over the past seven million years or so, it has grown in size and complexity, enabling us to use language, make plans for the future and coordinate with one another at a scale never seen before in the …

Rain may have been an essential ingredient for the origin of life, according to a study published on Wednesday. Life today exists as cells, which are sacs packed with DNA, RNA, proteins and other molecules. But when life arose roughly four billion years ago, cells were far simpler. Some scientists …

A new study describes 700,000-year-old teeth and arm bones from one of our most enigmatic relatives: a toddler-size “hobbit” who lived on a small island between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The study, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that the species, Homo floresiensis, sometimes nicknamed hobbits, …