In our digital age, few things are more irritating than a slow internet connection. Your web browser starts to lag. On video calls, the faces of your friends turn to frozen masks. When the flow of information dries up, it can feel as if we are cut off from the world.

Engineers measure this flow in bits per second. Streaming a high-definition video takes about 5 million bps. The download rate in a typical American home is about 262 million bps.

Continue reading “The Speed of Human Thought Lags Far Behind Your Internet Connection, Study Finds” →

Some 45,000 years ago, a tiny group of people — fewer than 1,000, all told — wandered the icy northern fringes of Europe. Across thousands of miles of tundra, they hunted woolly rhinoceros and other big game. Their skin was most likely dark. To keep warm in the bone-chilling temperatures, they probably wore the hides and furs of the animals they killed.

Continue reading “Oldest Human Genomes Reveal How a Small Group Burst Out of Africa” →

On Thursday, 38 prominent biologists issued a dire warning: Within a few decades, scientists will be able create a microbe that could cause an unstoppable pandemic, devastating crop losses or the collapse of entire ecosystems.

The scientists called for a ban on research that could lead to synthesis of such an organism.

“The consequences could be globally disastrous,” said Jack W. Szostak, a Nobel-prize-winning chemist at the University of Chicago who helped write a 299-page technical report on the risks of the research.

Continue reading “A ‘Second Tree of Life’ Could Wreak Havoc, Scientists Warn” →

For millions of years, North America was home to a zoo of giants: mammoths and mastodons, camels and dire wolves, sloths the size of elephants and beavers as big as bears. And then, at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch about 12,000 years ago, most of them vanished.

Scientists have argued for decades about the cause of their extinction. Now, a study analyzing the ancient bones of a young child who lived in Montana suggests that early Americans hunted mammoths and other giant mammals to oblivion.

Continue reading “Mammoth: It’s What Was for Dinner” →

Shortly after conception, a fertilized egg divides, becoming two. Then each of those cells splits, becoming four, and on and on. Over time, those lineages of cells grow distinct, giving rise to all the different organs and tissues in the human body and comprising as many as 36 trillion cells.

Scientists would love to understand the trajectory of each of those cells over time. “It’s something that developmental biologists like me have dreamed of for over 100 years,” said Alex Schier of the University of Basel in Switzerland. But the best they have managed has been taking snapshots of cells at different stages.

Continue reading “‘DNA Typewriters’ Can Record a Cell’s History” →