Artist Udo J. Keppler’s visualization of the long reach of John D. Rockefeller and his mega company, Standard Oil. Credit: Udo J. Keppler, Wikimedia Commons The world’s richest man and the world’s largest oil company dominated the petroleum market in Norway long before landmark finds on the Norwegian continental shelf […]
Does social media really cause high rates of depression among teens? By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn For years now, the popular media have been publishing overblown articles, with scare headlines, about the dangers of “screen time.” At first the main demon was video games. Claims were made that […]
Charles Deluvio/Unsplash, CC BY-SA Social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, and our own genetics are among the factors influencing us beyond our awareness. This raises an ancient question: do we have control over our own lives? This article is part of The Conversation’s series on the science of free will. Have you […]
These footprints were made by ancient humans’ muddy feet as they traversed a lakeshore in Saudi Arabia about 120,000 years ago. STEWART ET AL., 2020 One day about 120,000 years ago, a few humans wandered along the shore of an ancient lake in what is now the Nefud Desert in […]
Time-sensitive neurons fatigue and skew our perception of time. On some days, time flies by, while on others it seems to drag on. A new study from JNeurosci reveals why: time-sensitive neurons get worn out and skew our perceptions of time. Neurons in the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) fire in response to a […]
Credit: CC0 Public Domain People are starting almost all the wildfires that threaten U.S. homes, according to an innovative new analysis combining housing and wildfire data. Through activities like debris burning, equipment use and arson, humans were responsible for igniting 97% of home-threatening wildfires, a University of Colorado Boulder-led team […]
Two major theories have fueled a now 1,500 year-long debate started by Saint Augustine: Is consciousness continuous, where we are conscious at each single point in time, or is it discrete, where we are conscious only at certain moments of time? In an Opinion published September 3 in the journal Trends […]
New Brain Study Shows How Obeying Orders Can Dull Our Empathy War atrocities are sometimes committed by ‘normal’ people obeying orders. Researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience measured brain activity while participants inflicted pain and found that obeying orders reduced empathy and guilt related brain activity for the inflicted […]
ANU, Author provided Prehistoric axes and beads found in caves on a remote Indonesian island suggest this was a crucial staging post for seafaring people who lived in this region as the last ice age was coming to an end. Our discoveries, published today in PLOS ONE, suggest humans arrived on the […]
It’s important for successful adult-ing, experts say. Friendships can be made stronger through play-acting and problem solving. Robert Collins/Unsplash Archaeological records— and the modern-day antics of our primate relatives—make it clear that monkeying around goes way back. Less certain, however, are the developmental and evolutionary advantages that underlie our instinct […]