Knowing who to trust is part and parcel of everyday life. Instinctively we may trust one person but not fully understand why. Researchers have puzzled over this question for decades, trying to piece together what makes a person trustworthy or not. “Trustworthiness is essentially being a prosocial person,” says Sebastian Siuda, a psychologist who researches the dynamics of trust. “If somebody opens up to you and makes [themselves] vulnerable to you, you don’t use that act for your own goo ...read more

Edy Setyawan, a marine researcher in Raja Ampat, Indonesia, has spent nearly a decade researching manta rays. But he remembers one in particular: a baby that had gone “toe-to-toe” with a shark and was left with a brutal bite on its wing.The baby defended itself with its wing, Setyawan says, knowing that this is one of the few parts of its body that can recover from such an injury. The fact that even a pup knew how to survive in such a situation, he continues, is proof that these gentle giant ...read more

Ötzi the Iceman, the world’s oldest glacier mummy, was a short and slender man (an estimated 110 pounds) who had blackened lungs, presumably from sitting next to camp fires. His skin contained 61 bluish-black tattoos, which the artist may have intended as healing treatments.Researchers have learned many other details of his life because of DNA analysis, including Ötzi’s skin color and ancestry. A new such study has found that Ötzi was much balder than initially believed and had darker ski ...read more

A new discovery concerning Gale Crater mud on Mars increases the likelihood that the planet has developed some form of life in the past. This time, it’s not the composition of the mud, but its dried-out, cracked pattern of neat hexagons that matters.When mud dries, it typically forms a more squared-off pattern. But when mud dries, re-moistens, and dries again repeatedly, the pattern can shift to board-game-like hexagons.“This is the first tangible evidence we’ve seen that the ancient clima ...read more

In a dense Salvadoran rainforest, a conservation detection dog named Niffler was engrossed in a peculiar training exercise. Like a determined scavenger hunt participant, his mission was clear: locate carnivore scat samples that his handler, Kayla Fratt, co-founder of K9 Conservationists, had hidden along a trail. Niffler searched tirelessly for his target, signaling his find by laying in front of the sample, paws and nose framing it on three sides. This critical exercise was not just a game – ...read more

Archaeologists have recently confirmed that a Japanese society that prospered between roughly A.D. 200 and A.D. 600 on the island of Tanegashima modified craniums for mysterious reasons. While the recent paper explains that the modified skulls reinforced group identification and belonging, they may also have something to do with the local shellfish trade. The Hirota people clearly valued mollusks, as they lined their graves with funerary goods made from shellfish brought from hundreds of miles a ...read more

During the late Jurassic period around 150 million years ago, a small tyrannosauroid called Stokesosaurus lived in North America. This tiny carnivore had to keep an eye out for the much larger Allosaurus while hunting and scavenging.But by the late Cretaceous period, around 66 million years ago, Allosaurus was long gone and tyrannosauroids had evolved into hulking, ferocious top predators. Case in point: the infamous Tyrannosaurus rex.  For many decades, scientists could not find any North Ame ...read more

Wouldst thou … learn the secret of the sea? Only those who brave its dangers Comprehend its mystery!Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was talking about sailors in that 1850 verse, and it was indeed the mariners of ancient times who braved the uncharted dangers of the ocean, encountering mysteries aplenty.But they didn’t always fully comprehend what they saw. In a time when uncharted areas on maps were decorated with dragons and other mythical creatures, sailors of old likewise embellished th ...read more

One of the workhorses of in any biology lab is Caenorhabditis elegans or nematode worm just 1mm long. Biologist regularly use C. elegans to gain insight into topics ranging from embryonic development and aging to genetics and neurobiology. In 1986, C. elegans became the first to have its entire nervous system mapped out. This creature, it turns out, contains just 302 neurons with 7000 synaptic connections between them, the fewest of any animal. Scientists hoped that such a map — a connectome � ...read more

Long before the Ancient Egyptians walked the Earth and the great pyramids were constructed, something else inhabited what is now Egypt. Some 41 million years ago, Egypt's desert was covered by an ancient sea and was once home to the now-extinct whale species, Tutcetus rayanensis.According to a recent study published in Communications Biology, the newly discovered T. rayanensis is the smallest basilosaurid whale species known to date, and one of the oldest specimens of the whale family fou ...read more