How does getting an abortion — or not — influence a woman's life? Demographer Diana Greene Foster puts forward the results of The Turnaway Study, her landmark work following nearly 1,000 women through abortion or childbirth, presenting...

If you've spent enough time on the internet, you may have stumbled upon the fact that sharks are older than Polaris, aka the North Star. But are they really? It turns out the truth is a little more complicated.

One of the most famous elements in the periodic table doesn't really belong anywhere chemists would like to put it.

People often describe failure as a teachable moment— a necessary stumble on our way to improvement. But learning from our mistakes isn't always easy, especially when those failures are demoralizing, overwhelming, or just downright...

A 2006 study took a class of surgical residents and split them into two groups. Each received the same study materials, but one group was told to use specific study methods. When tested a month later, this group performed significantly...

Artist Doris Mitsch invites us to revel in the wonders of nature through her dazzling photography: stacked images of starlings in flight, hawks surfing thermal updrafts, bats echolocating through the night sky and more. Revealing the...

Environmental activist Gopal D. Patel thinks the climate movement could learn a lot from one of the longest-standing social initiatives in human history: religion. Exploring three areas where frameworks from faith traditions could...

A person's chronological age doesn't tell us much about the health of their body's various systems. That's why scientists are beginning to study biological ages, and it turns out there may be a lot of them. <br/>

The earth is always moving, and our view of the night sky is slowly but surely changing.

At more than 2 meters long, Aegirocassis was not only the biggest radiodont ever, but it also may have been the biggest animal in the Early Ordovician. This bizarre marine giant may have only been possible, thanks to a major revolution...

The Amazon rainforest of South America is a paradise for flowering plants. But long ago, the landscape that we now think of as the Amazon looked very different. And would you believe that the entire revolution of the Amazon began with...

Around 10,000 years ago, somewhere in Africa, a microscopic parasite made a huge leap. With a little help from a mosquito, it left its animal host - probably a gorilla - and found its way to a new host: us.

It might surprise you but cephalopods have a pretty good fossil record, with one major exception. If squids were swimming around in the same oceans as their closest cousins, where did all the squids go?

We all belong to the only group of hominins on the planet today. But we weren’t always alone. 100,000 years ago, Eurasia was home to other hominin species, some of which we know our ancestors met, and spent some quality time with.

Synapsids were the world’s first-ever terrestrial megafauna but the vast majority of these giants were doomed to extinction. However some lived on, keeping a low profile among the dinosaurs. And now our world is the way it is because of...

In Australia, evolution built a family of deadly predators by taking a group of cute, harmless herbivores and turning them murderous.

If you know one thing about pterosaurs, it’s that they’re flyers. And while pterosaurs may be well-known for their domination of the skies in the Mesozoic Era, they didn’t live their entire lives in the air. So how did we figure this...

Lizards are incredibly widespread and diverse but it took them a long time to get to where they are now. Because they used to face some pretty stiff competition from a group of lizard look-alikes.

Its discoverers named it Homo floresiensis, but it’s often called “the hobbit” for its short stature and oddly proportioned feet. And it’s been at the center of a major controversy in the field ever since. Was it its own species? Or was...

Bats pretty much appear in the fossil record as recognizable, full-on, flying bats. And they show up on all of the continents, except Antarctica, around the same time. So where did bats come from? And which of the many weird features...

While we’ve been farming for around 10,000 to 12,000 years, the ancestors of ants have been doing it for around 60 million years. So when, and how, and why did ants start … farming?

Early primates not only lived in North America -- our primate family tree actually originated here! So what happened to those early relatives of ours?

They may not look like much, but beneath that shell lies an evolutionary mystery - one that stumped the biggest names in natural history for over a hundred years.

A truly enormous ichthyosaur around the size of a modern sperm whale, reached its size within just a few million years of taking to the water - a blink of an eye in evolutionary time.