Long before this cave painting was made, our ancestors met and interacted with multiple types of ancient human. (Credit: Jannarong/Shutterstock) For the past ~40,000 years, Homo sapiens — modern humans — has been the only Homo species on Earth. But for most of our history, there were close evolutionary cousins of ours, human but not quite like us, coexisting and evolving at the same time in different regions. Some of our now-extinct relatives, such as the Neanderthals, are well ...read more

For children of the 1960s, Apollo was a not a single event but an extended way of looking at the world. Here, boys watch the Apollo 8 Christmas Eve broadcast. (Credit: Bruce Dale/National Geographic Creative) The 50th anniversary of Apollo 11--which kissed lunar soil on July 20, 1969--has prompted a flood of retrospectives. My local Barnes & Noble features an entire long table covered with anniversary books. If you want a lightly fictionalized big-screen account of Apollo 11, you can wat ...read more

Take action with the EarthEcho Water Challenge to collect and share water quality data. Then, work to protect your local water resources. About the EarthEcho Water Challenge On March 22, this year’s EarthEcho Water Challenge kicked off, empowering young people and community members around the world to monitor and protect local water resources in their communities. Initiated in 2003 as the World Water Monitoring Challenge (in celebration of the U.S. Clean Water Act), this year-round, ...read more

(Credit: Karl Gottlieb von Windisch/Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image) In 1783, an autonomous machine beat Benjamin Franklin in a game of chess. Well, at least that’s what he was led to believe.   Franklin’s opponent was a life-size, humanlike figure seated at a large wooden cabinet, supposedly rigged with machinery that made it capable of playing a game of chess without human support. It was known as the Turk. Over 230 years after the automaton played its mat ...read more

(Credit: Nopphon_1987/Shutterstock We all know smoking is bad for your health. But it seems smoking might be bad for your personality, too. A recent paper published in the Journal of Research In Personality reports that, compared to people who didn’t smoke, cigarette smokers were more likely to report not-so-great changes in certain aspects of their personalities. What’s more, giving up smoking didn’t help reverse those changes. Smoking: Through the Years The ...read more

Soy products have repeatedly been found to help cholesterol levels. But do they do enough to make a difference? (Credit: 1989studio/Shutterstock) If you pick up a carton of soy milk, chances are you’ll spot some sort of verbiage boasting the beverage’s heart health benefits. But it’s not the only soy-based food product bearing a “heart healthy” badge. That’s because, in 1999, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal agency responsible for supervi ...read more

Stromboli erupting on July 3, 2019. Image by Anil Charley/Twitter. There is the strong tendency in humans to look for patterns, even when none exist. This is amplified by the modern effect of news media, where certain events make headlines for reasons not necessarily related to the severity of the event. We see this frequently in geology, where a news-making eruption or earthquake then starts a cascade of reports of other eruptions and earthquakes that follow, even if they aren't disaste ...read more

On July 13, 1969, Apollo 11’s Saturn V sat on launchpad 39A at Cape Canaveral. The pre-launch countdown was already underway though the actual final countdown wouldn't start for another day and a half. Nevertheless, there was plenty of activity buzzing around the Cape, but the big news in space that day wasn't the impending manned lunar landing attempt. It was Luna 15, the Soviet mission that would reach the Moon while Apollo 11 was in orbit. The Luna Program The Luna program was ...read more

(Credit: Jay Mantri/Shutterstock) Climate change is devastating coral reefs, raising sea levels and displacing people across the globe. Now researchers say the best solution is also the simplest: plant more forests. In a new analysis out Thursday in the journal Science, scientists report restoring forests could cut atmospheric carbon by 25 percent. “We all knew restoring forests could play a part in tackling climate change, but we had no scientific understanding of what impact this c ...read more

(Credit: Natthawut Raruen/Shutterstock) Elephants might be popular in zoos and older kids’ TV shows, but they’re not doing so great in the wild. Asian elephants are classified as endangered, thanks in large part to human activity. But the big beasts are brainy, and they’re trying apparently trying new things in the face of these changing conditions to survive and even thrive. At least, that’s what a team of Indian researchers describes in a Scientific Reports paper ...read more