May. 11, 2021 , 2:55 PM
More than 10 million years ago, the world was brimming with a wide variety of apes. Scientists studying the ones that are still alive today can learn a lot about human evolution but they miss out on many clues that can only be found from the apes that went extinct. Watch to learn how fossil apes have strengthened ideas about how humans evolved, and what steps we can take to learn even more about our ancient ancestors. Correction, 12 May, 4:45 p.m.: In the above video at 1:10 we stated that some living apes today adapted to survive in new, open environments. This is inaccurate surviving lineages of apes likely specialized to live in the remaining tropical forests, not in open environments. At 1:45 Pierolapithecus catalaunicus
It’s been an amazing news week on Planet Earth, with stories ranging from our physics tells us almost nothing about the deepest riddles of the Universe to human consciousness could reside in the brain’s electromagnetic field to the upcoming release according to the Washington Post of a major report on intelligence gathered by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the FBI.
The Cosmic Chasm–Physics as we know it is elegant and exquisitely accurate. It tells almost nothing about the deepest riddles of the Universe, reports Pedro G Ferreira, professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, author of
Ancient fish share a key feature of human vision sciencemag.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sciencemag.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Podcast Producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Pamela Soltis, a professor and curator with the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida and the director of the University of Florida Biodiversity Institute, about how natural collections at museums can be a valuable resource for understanding future disease outbreaks. Read the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report
Also on this week’s show, Katharina Schmack, a research associate at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, joins producer Joel Goldberg to talk about giving mice a quiz that makes them hallucinate. Observing the mice in this state helps researchers make connections between dopamine, hallucinations, and mental illness.