In 2015, while working as an undergraduate researcher at the North Carolina Zoo, Laura Lewis became friends with a male chimpanzee named Kendall. Whenever she visited the chimps, Kendall would gently take her hands and inspect her fingernails.

Then she disappeared for the summer to study baboons in Africa. When she returned to North Carolina, she wondered if Kendall would still remember her face. Sure enough, as soon as she stepped into his enclosure, Kendall raced up and gestured to look at her hands.

Continue reading “Chimps Can Still Remember Faces After a Quarter Century” →

Neanderthals were morning people, a new study suggests. And some humans today who like getting up early might credit genes they inherited from their Neanderthal ancestors.

The new study compared DNA in living humans with genetic material retrieved from Neanderthal fossils. It turns out that Neanderthals carried some of the same clock-related genetic variants as do people who report being early risers.

Continue reading “Morning Person? You Might Have Neanderthal Genes to Thank.” →

Why do we grow old and die?

In the 19th century, the German biologist August Weismann argued that the machinery of life inevitably wore out with time. Death had evolved “for the need of the species,” he declared. It cleared away weak, old individuals so they wouldn’t compete with young ones.

That explanation never made sense to George Williams, an American evolutionary biologist. Natural selection acts only on the genes that are passed down from one generation to the next. What happens at the end of an animal’s life can have no effect on the course of evolution.

Continue reading “Genes That Boost Fertility Also Shorten Our Life, Study Suggests” →

Traumatic brain injuries have left more than five million Americans permanently disabled. They have trouble focusing on even simple tasks and often have to quit jobs or drop out of school.

A study published on Monday has offered them a glimpse of hope. Five people with moderate to severe brain injuries had electrodes implanted in their heads. As the electrodes stimulated their brains, their performance on cognitive tests improved.

Continue reading “Brain Implants Helped 5 People Toward Recovery After Traumatic Injuries” →

Penguins are champion power nappers. Over the course of a single day, they fall asleep thousands of times, each bout a few seconds long, a new study has found.

Although animals have a wide range of sleeping styles, penguins easily take the record for fragmented sleeping.

“It’s really unusual,” said Paul-Antoine Libourel, a neuroscientist at the Neuroscience Research Center of Lyon in France who helped make the discovery. “This just highlights the fact that we don’t know much about sleep, and all animals are not sleeping like the way we read in textbooks.”

Continue reading “Penguins Take Thousands of Naps Every Day” →