“Early men and women were equal, say scientists”

“A study has shown that in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, men and women tend to have equal influence on where their group lives and who they live with. The findings challenge the idea that sexual equality is a recent invention, suggesting…

“2015 is the year the old internet finally died”

“The internet has made it clear that the kinds of things that people want to read are sort of an endless collection of what’s cool. And that might be a longform story, or it might be the quick, clicky little things that repackage the best…

“Tracing Ancestry, Researchers Produce a Genetic Atlas of Human Mixing Events”

“geneticists applying new statistical approaches have taken a first shot at both identifying and dating the major population mixture events of the last 4,000 years, with the goal of providing a…

“Yes, We Were Warned About Ebola”

“We were stunned recently when we stumbled across an article by European researchers in Annals of Virology: “The results seem to indicate that Liberia has to be included in the Ebola virus endemic zone.” In the future, the authors asserted, “medical personnel in…

“Beware the bad survey: Science literacy isn’t as bad as the statistics make it look”

“Typically, these statistics have a short life cycle. They get used by journalists for amusing articles, grumbled about by science-y people on Twitter, and fade away before being…

“Coffin remains tell life story of ancient sun-worshiping priestess”

“Once upon a time in the Bronze Age, a girl was born to a family of sun worshipers living in the Black Forest of what is today Germany. When she was young she became a priestess in the local sun cult, and soon…

“Just a Brown Hand”

“Why was the choice an important one, and why did it matter to the people of color who saw it? The simple answer is that they rarely see something like that. These people saw the image and immediately noticed how unusual it was. They were appreciative of being represented in a world where…

“The Conference Manifesto”

“We have been one of two attendees at a panel.

We have suffered in silence while someone, for the duration of their talk, simply lists the appearances of a certain theme in a novel.

Our faces have twitched as our colleagues…