Science

But slashing fossil fuel use also presents greatest global opportunity to improve people’s health in 21st century, says Lancet and UCL commission

Are you a psychopath? Happens to the best of us. James Fallon, a neuroscientist studying Alzheimer’s effects on the brain, accidentally discovered that he was a psychopath and then he wrote a book about the experience. Fallon, like most people with psychopathic brains, wasn’t a violent person or a serial killer. But after discovering his brain pathology, he began interviewing friends, relatives and loved ones to see if there had been signs of psychopathy in his behavior all along. It turned out there were plenty. The diagnosis befuddled Fallon, but made total sense to pretty much everyone else in his life.

The world is embarking on its sixth mass extinction with animals disappearing about 100 times faster than they used to, scientists warned Friday, and humans could be among the first victims.

When a nearly complete 9,000-year old human skeleton washed out of a Columbia River cutbank at Kennewick in Washington State in 1996, archaeologists hailed it as the most important find of the century. But the discovery sparked a fierce legal battle between scientists and local Native Americans about Kennewick Man’s ancestry and what to do with the remains that has been raging ever since. A new study that will further fuel the debate shows that he was, most likely, Native American.

I have always wondered why our species Homo sapiens, that evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago, seemed to do nothing special for the first 150,000 years. Because it is not until about 50,000 years ago that the first sign of creative thinking emerged with beautiful cave paintings found in Spain, France and Indonesia.

Some say she looks like a ghost from the Pac-Man video game, but she's anything but spooky. In fact, the fist-sized pink octopus is so cute scientists may call her "Opisthoteuthis Adorabilis."

Filming is underway in Poland on a new biopic about the life of Marie Sklodowska-Curie, the first woman ever to win not one, but two, Nobel prizes for her seminal discoveries in physics and chemistry.

Last month marked the hottest May in modern history, continuing a troubling trend of rising global temperatures, US government scientists said Thursday.

More than half of female science students and a large majority of female academic staff have been made to feel uncomfortable because they are women, a survey released this week found.

Skepticism about the existence of God is on the rise, and this might, quite literally, pose an existential threat for religious believers.

A growing online craze among some fitness communities, fetishists and chronic disease sufferers for buying and drinking human breast milk poses serious health risks, British experts said on Thursday.

A five-decade study of US women has found that those exposed to high levels of the pesticide DDT in the womb were four times as likely to get breast cancer.

Human activity is leading to the rapid draining of about one third of the planet's largest underground water reserves and it is unclear how much fluid remains in them, two new studies have found.