I am fascinated by footprints left behind by our prehuman and modern ancestors. Those tracks stir the imagination in ways that bones, including the skull, do not — at least for me. One

Neanderthals lived between 30,000 and 400,000 years ago and then, throughout their wide Eurasian range, disappeared for mysterious reasons. Genetic studies suggest they probably lived in small, widely scattered groups. That mode of

Science, art and religion may be part of the human landscape but in the present day they tend to be separate despite common, deep evolutionary roots. For most modern humans, visual art is

Entanglement at a distance might apply to two lovers or different countries aligned by common interests, but to physicists it applies to two or more identical particles, say two photons of light or

You may have heard of gene editing and CRISPR. But what about minibrains, embryos without fathers, mothers and placentas, and brain implants? The pace in biological research has been astounding in the last

For much of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century physics was divided between the universe of the large (galaxies, stars and other stellar bodies) and the universe of

Brain injuries affected thousands of military personnel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most involved blast injuries and concussions and left those affected with cognitive and behavioural deficits, and significant impairments in short-

This year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry to Barry Sharpless, Morten Meldal and Carolyn Bertozzi was a work of art in science. It was a beautiful, elegant and compelling story  of how the best scientists

The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901 with occasional years off during the two world wars. The enterprise began with wealthy Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, an engineer by training, perhaps more famous

Have you ever noticed that longtime close friends, partners and spouses sometimes seem to behave and even look as one, and sense what the other is feeling and thinking – even when they’re

Maybe not so much for cats, but many dog owners insist that they can read how their dog is feeling and in turn, their dog can sense how their owners feel. One of

Despite hundreds of studies, no one knows what causes long COVID. The symptoms are real enough, debilitating fatigue, loss of energy, headaches, difficulties concentrating and focusing (what’s been called “brain fog”), trouble sleeping

Nothing is constant where empires, nations, borders and governments are concerned. That’s certainly been true for China and much of the rest of the world in my lifetime. When I was a boy

There isn’t much I remember about the church of my childhood except stuffy, will-they-ever-end church services, my Sunday school teacher, who preferred talking about baseball and those uncomfortable itchy wool pants my parents

For much of history an end to breathing and a beating heart, marked death. This all changed in the last half of the 20th century when cardiopulmonary resuscitation, mechanical ventilation and, more recently,

Working on the longest time scale, 13 billion years ago and beyond, the James Webb Space Telescope is set to explore the roles of dark matter and giant black holes in creating stars

By the mid-20th century, quantum physics was a mature major success story. Fifty years earlier, some scientists including Max Planck, questioned whether the atom even existed. Yet within half a century, the particle

In highly social species such as chimpanzees, understanding who’s in charge, who has influence, who’s in, who’s out, and shifting alliances between others, often make big differences when it comes to finding a