When meeting potential partners, some of us are more aloof or act uninterested.Charles Darwin noted this idea of playing hard-to-get in regards to mating back in 1871, which some have interpreted as coyness. This term, as defined by the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, refers to “the fact of being shy or of pretending to be shy and innocent, especially about love or sex, and sometimes in order to make people more interested in you.”Sound familiar? Research has actually documented this behavior ...read more

A new fossil discovery bolsters an idea first proposed in 2005: Early mammals that lived during the Cretaceous Period were not just shrinking violets, little shrews hiding in the shadows of dinosaurs. As the new thinking goes, some of the mammals were predators themselves that attacked and ate small dinosaurs and their young.The new fossil from China shows a small, badger-like predator, a Repenomamus robustus, on top of a Psittacosaurus, a beaked herbivorous dinosaur about the size of a large do ...read more

When a parent smacks a child’s hand or swats their butt, they may think they’ve merely “spanked” their child. So it might be surprising to learn that scholars actually refer to these spanks as “corporal punishment.”Parents might also find it unsettling to learn that some scholars have described spanking as most children’s “first experience of being the victim of a deliberate physical attack.”Scientists are trying to understand more about childhood spanking and how it affects ...read more

Within a square-shaped pond in Ban Si Liam, Thailand, paleontologists excavated nine specimens of ancient reptiles in 2005. Among the treasure trove of fossils, scientists found a near-complete skull of an ancient alligator.Now, after further examination and a study published in Scientific Reports, researchers found that the early skull is closely related to the modern-day Chinese alligator, Alligator sinensis. The remains are crucial for tracing the evolutionary origin of the species. Ancient ...read more

Reports of orcas launching attacks on yachts have made waves in the news recently. This novel behavior – orcas ramming boats – has spawned a flurry of orca memes and prompted speculation about the root of this strange behavior.While we still don’t know why orcas are attacking boats, the phenomenon spotlights a fascinating aspect of the animal world: the emergence and spread of culture.Do Animals Have Culture?Culture, once thought to be a unique characteristic of humans, is actually found ...read more

In this summer of continuing extreme weather and devastating impacts, Canada has been particularly hard hit.As of Sunday, July 16, 881 wildfires were blazing there, according to data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. Since the start of the year, 4,157 fires have burned across nearly 39,000 square miles of land — an area slightly bigger than the State of Maine. That tally of torching — the result of a continuing combination of unusual heat, drought, and dry lightning — has a ...read more

Two-million-year-old teeth (four sets, in fact) tell new stories in a newly posted preprint paper that strips them of enamel and analyzes what the proteins have to say. This "proteomic" approach, which relied on the more rugged protein molecules instead of fragile DNA, revealed their relationship to the wider family tree of early humans.Taken from a sediment-filled cave in South Africa, the fossilized teeth once formed the dentition of an ancient hominin, Paranthropus robustus.This species was d ...read more

You know about Einstein, and you’re no doubt familiar with Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, but there are plenty of famous physicists alive today that you should know about if you don’t already. Here are a few worth getting to know. 1. Alan GuthA cosmologist and particle physicist, Guth is most famous for developing the idea of cosmic inflation, or an inflationary universe. This work helped nail down the details and fill in some of the gaps in the Big Bang theory. Guth’s 1997 book,� ...read more

An individual’s personality can often shine in short texts and emails. The same also seems to be true of Large Language Model AI systems like Bard, ChatGPT and others. Hundreds of millions of people have discovered that in short conversations, these AI systems can come across as authoritative, sometimes as arrogant and occasionally as deranged. And that raises an interesting question: is it possible to reliably measure the characteristics of these AI personalities and then modify them in a way ...read more

“Ghost stars,” or planetary nebulae, are some of the most beautiful objects in the cosmos. Formed when a red giant star burns through its nuclear fuel and sheds its outer layers, the nebulae (which have nothing to do with planets) expand outward in striking patterns. Some of these exhibit strange properties, according to a new paper, which studied 136 nebulae using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.Many nebulae close to the galactic bulge – the central sec ...read more