For decades, fishermen sailing off the coast of Taiwan have sometimes discovered fossils in their trawling nets: the bones of elephants, buffalo and other big mammals that lived tens of thousands of years ago, when the sea level was so low that Taiwan was linked to Asia by a land bridge.

But in 2010, a Taiwanese paleontologist was presented with a particularly odd find: a fossil that looked like half a gorilla’s jaw. Scientists have puzzled over it ever since.

Continue reading “With a Jawbone, Scientists Expand the Ancient Range of a Mysterious Human Relative” →

The human brain is so complex that scientific brains have a hard time making sense of it. A piece of neural tissue the size of a grain of sand might be packed with hundreds of thousands of cells linked together by miles of wiring. In 1979, Francis Crick, the Nobel-prize-winning scientist, concluded that the anatomy and activity in just a cubic millimeter of brain matter would forever exceed our understanding.

Continue reading “An Advance in Brain Research That Was Once Considered Impossible” →

For more than a decade, scientists have chased the idea of reviving extinct species, a process sometimes called de-extinction. Now, a company called Colossal Biosciences appears to have done it, or something close, with the dire wolf, a giant, extinct species made famous by the television series “Game of Thrones.”

In 2021, a separate team of scientists managed to retrieve DNA from the fossils of dire wolves, which went extinct about 13,000 years ago. With the discovery of additional DNA, the Colossal researchers have now edited 20 genes of gray wolves to imbue the animals with key features of dire wolves. They then created embryos from the edited gray-wolf cells, implanted them in surrogate dog mothers and waited for them to give birth.

Continue reading “Scientists Revive the Dire Wolf, or Something Close” →

After listening to hundreds of hours of ape calls, a team of scientists say they have detected a hallmark of human language: the ability to put together strings of sounds to create new meanings.

The provocative finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, drew praise from some scholars and skepticism from others.

Continue reading “In the Calls of Bonobos, Scientists Hear Hints of Language” →

The Trump administration has canceled funding for dozens of studies seeking new vaccines and treatments for Covid-19 and other pathogens that may cause future pandemics.

The government’s rationale is that the Covid pandemic has ended, which “provides cause to terminate Covid-related grant funds,” according to an internal N.I.H. document viewed by The New York Times.

Continue reading “H.H.S. Scraps Studies of Vaccines and Treatments for Future Pandemics” →