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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Humans, unlike most other species, have a knack for making tools.

Six million years ago, our apelike ancestors probably smashed nuts with rocks or caught termites with sticks. Around 3.3 million years ago, hominins began using flakes of stone, perhaps to cut flesh from carcasses or chop plants.

Continue reading “Trove of Ancient Axes Shows Early Humans Made Tools From Bones” →