Normandy’s beaches bear more than memories of D-Day, the 1944 landing of some 130,000 Allied troops in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. Another human species once stalked those grounds.About 80,000 years before WWII, when the shore lay several miles farther out, Neanderthals camped on the dunes of what is now Normandy. Butchering prey, fashioning stone tools, building fires — as the group busied themselves with daily chores, they left hundreds of footprints in the mud.Sands swept ov ...read more

It’s the season for emergences, whether you’re a dragonfly, firefly, periodical cicada or fly fishing enthusiast! The warm weather brings a variety of citizen science opportunities, some of them fleeting, so we hope you can get outdoors and experience the wonders of nature with your friends and family, and help document them for the many researchers trying to understand and preserve them.Dragonfly SwarmA female blue dasher dragonfly (Pachydiplax longipennis) gazes out at her blog-reading aud ...read more

The world is rich with sound — birdsong, rainfall, children playing in a park, traffic on a busy street, a crowd cheering at a sporting event. But for some people, rather than enriching life, sound can make life nigh unbearable.A condition called hyperacusis, sometimes called sound sensitivity, is a rare hearing disorder in which sounds that typically don’t bother most people seem particularly loud and uncomfortable. Some common sounds that are unbearable to people with hyperacusis are water ...read more

Have you ever walked into a room and then wondered why you went there?If you’ve experienced this phenomenon, you’ve had a prospective memory lapse.Memory usually means remembering things that have already happened. But prospective memory is the ability to remember to do something in the future – such as stopping to get milk on the way home from work, calling your mom on her birthday or remembering to take your casserole out of the oven. Sometimes, errors lead to heartbreaking results – s ...read more

Everything in biology ultimately boils down to food and sex. To survive as an individual you need food. To survive as a species you need sex.Not surprisingly then, the age-old question of why giraffes have long necks has centered around food and sex. After debating this question for the past 150 years, biologists still cannot agree on which of these two factors was the most important in the evolution of the giraffe’s neck. In the past three years, my colleagues and I have been trying to get to ...read more

Neanderthals stopped roaming Earth around 40,000 years ago. Yet as time passes, new technologies are helping scientists learn more about Homo neanderthalensis, how they might have lived, and what similarities they may have shared with Homo sapiens. There’s even a debate about what Neanderthals sounded like.  Scientists have long debated whether Neanderthals were capable of speech. Some argue that Neanderthals lacked the anatomical ability to even produce sounds.In the 1980s, scientists disco ...read more

The much anticipated 2024 Atlantic hurricane season is here, and with ocean heat setting records, plus a looming La Niña, it may well take an appalling toll. Tropical cyclones are fueled by oceanic heat, and right now, the gas tank is overflowing.As University of Miami tropical cyclone expert Brian McNoldy posted to social media the other day, "It's June 1, the first day of Atlantic #HurricaneSeason, and the ocean heat content averaged in the Main Development Region is as high as it normally wo ...read more

These were plenty of legends of societies that once thrived in a distant time and place. Some have been found and excavated so that we can begin to understand how these civilizations of yesteryear might have lived. But some exist only in legend. Real or fantasy, here are some of the ancient societies that inspired many, and some that were never found. 1. Machu Picchu(Credit: Sharan Prasad Anumolu/Shutterstock) High in the mountains of Peru stands Machu Picchu, a 15th-century citadel that was a ...read more

Mars is between 33 and 249 million miles away from Earth, depending on the time of year you make the journey. That comes out to about two years of travel.Once you get there, conditions on the Red Planet are brutal, with temperatures ranging from around -248 degrees Fahrenheit to 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Just getting there is a feat that seems difficult to imagine, yet once astronauts make the trek, they’re in for an intense workload.According to NASA, plans are in the works for travel to Mars as ...read more

From crucial vaccines to new insights about diseases, nearly all biomedical research starts with the study of human cell samples in a lab.  All of these samples are originally taken from human patients. But when they make their way to the lab, most of these samples — including the HeLa cell line, one of the world’s most prominent cell samples — are viewed independently from the person they were sampled from. Who Was Henrietta Lacks?These samples don’t exist in a vacuum. Notably, the H ...read more