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When scientists unveiled the fossil remains of a newly discovered human species from South Africa called Homo naledilast September, the find electrified audiences around the world. It was an astonishing haul: some 1,550 specimens representing at least 15 individuals, recovered over just a few weeks of intensive excavation from the Rising Star Cave system outside Johannesburg. But it was the researchers’ favored explanation for how the remains ended up in the cave, more than the fossils themselves, that captured the public imagination and jolted the paleoanthropology community....

By Mica Rosenberg (Reuters) - A bumble bee once common in the United States is disappearing so quickly it should be listed as an endangered species, environmentalists said in a lawsuit filed against U.S. government agencies on Tuesday. The rusty patched bumble bee is now found in fewer and fewer areas as urbanization and agriculture reshape their traditional habitat on the Midwestern prairies, said the suit, which was filed in U....

Meteorological summer has begun in the Northern Hemisphere, but what is happening right now in the arctic could dramatically affect the weather you confront come December. This past winter was the warmest in U.S. history whereas eastern Europe was stuck in a deadly deep freeze with snow piled up to the rooftops. The winter before, however, it was the U.S. that got clobbered. What’s going on? What will happen this year?...

Legend has it that vampires create no shadows, cast no reflection and—in more modern versions of the tale—cannot be captured on photographs, film or video. Of course, vampires are only myths. Unfortunately, schistosomes, which behave in some similar ways, are not. These infectious worms dwell in human veins and eat our blood. Among parasitic illnesses, the World Health Organization ranks schistosomiasis, the disease caused by the worms, second only to malaria in terms of the number of people it kills and chronically disables and the drag it imposes on the social and economic development of nations....

Never make the mistake of opening a reporter’s notebook inside the River Club. James Watson, the Nobel laureate who co-discovered the double-helical structure of DNA in 1953, which has been getting renewed attention with the release of a play and the publication of a trove of lost letters, is seated on a leather banquette in the posh Manhattan establishment. “People don’t do work here. It’s just not done,” he admonishes. Our companions grow jittery, and an awkward silence falls....

Alex Quinn, a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Applied Ecology at the University of Canberra in Australia, sorts this quandary out for us. Sex-determining mechanisms in reptiles are broadly divided into two main categories: genotypic sex determination (GSD) and temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD). Species in the genotypic group, like mammals and birds, have sex chromosomes, which in reptiles come in two major types. Many species—such as several species of turtle and lizards, like the green iguana—have X and Y sex chromosomes (again, like mammals), with females being “homogametic,” that is, having two identical X chromosomes....

In the latest police shooting of an unarmed black man, an officer in North Miami this week shot Charles Kinsey—a therapist who was lying on the ground with his arms in the air. He had apparently been trying to help a patient with autism who was sitting in the street. Kinsey survived, but the incident follows lethal ones in Minnesota and Louisiana and the murders of eight officers in two states....

Self-control—the ability to regulate our attention, emotions and behaviors—emerges in childhood and grows throughout life, but the skill varies widely among individuals. Past studies have reported that self-control is partially inherited and partially learned and that those with less self-control are more likely to be unemployed, en­gage in unhealthy behaviors such as overeating, and live a shorter life. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA tying childhood self-control to health and well-being in adulthood suggests that everyone, not just those most lacking the skill, would benefit from a self-control boost....

When you debate a friend on the opposite end of the political spectrum, do you sometimes feel like you are talking to someone from a different planet? That might not be far from the truth: a 2015 study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests liberals and conservatives think as though they come if not from different planets, at least from radically different cultures. Previous research has shown that people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (“WEIRD,” in psychological parlance) tend to think analytically, using logical rules, whereas those that are non-WEIRD process information more intuitively....

A Buddhist monk—this one with a doctorate in cell biology—has teamed with two prominent neuroscientists to present the latest findings on what meditation does to the brain and how those changes to neural circuits have some of the trappings of what might be labeled a perfect drug—Prozac-like muting of depression symptoms or prophylaxis against PTSD (just two on the list). Read “Mind of the Meditator” by Ricard Matthieu, Antoine Lutz and Richard J....

Our five senses–sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell–seem to operate independently, as five distinct modes of perceiving the world. In reality, however, they collaborate closely to enable the mind to better understand its surroundings. We can become aware of this collaboration under special circumstances. In some cases, a sense may covertly influence the one we think is dominant. When visual information clashes with that from sound, sensory crosstalk can cause what we see to alter what we hear....

Irritate a male platypus during breeding season, and you may end up trapped by its stumpy hind legs, threatened by a set of sharp spurs that are armed with venom. The painful poison hobbles male competitors and is a handy defense against pesky humans and dogs. It is also a somewhat odd concoction, as might be expected from a mammal that is famous for its egg-laying, duck-billed weirdness. Platypus venom contains a class of molecules that biologists once thought did not occur naturally outside the microscopic world of bacteria....

Antarctica might seem an unlikely place to find microbes that degrade wood. The icy continent has no trees, and it lacks the warm, damp conditions typically associated with decomposition. But in recent years several species of fungi have been found on wood structures built there by Ernest Shackleton and other early 20th-century explorers. Scientists grew some of these unusual organisms in the laboratory and found they produced never before seen chemicals—which researchers are now investigating for potential applications in medicine....

Most clean energy technologies and sectors worldwide are not advancing enough to meet the temperature goals set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement, according to a new analysis. Of 46 clean energy categories that the International Energy Agency sees as crucial for minimizing the impacts of climate change, only six are “on track” to meet the target of preventing global average temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius or more, according to IEA’s “Tracking Clean Energy Progress” report released this week....

The Esalen Institute is a cluster of meeting rooms, lodging facilities and hot tubs all nestled into a stunning craggy outcrop of the Pacific coast in Big Sur, Calif. In his 1985 book, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman recounts his experience in the natural hot spring baths there, in which a woman is being massaged by a man she just met. “He starts to rub her big toe....

Computer experts recently gathered in San Antonio, Tex., to test one last time how well their software programs enabled a mobile robot vehicle to think for—and steer—itself. The event wrapped up the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) three-year Learning Applied to Ground Robots (LAGR) initiative, which awarded each of eight teams of scientists $2 million to $3 million to develop software that would give unmanned vehicles the ability to autonomously learn and navigate irregular off-road terrain....

One of the biggest mysteries in physics is why there’s matter in the universe at all. This week, a group of physicists at the world’s largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, might be closer to an answer: They found that particles in the same family as the protons and neutrons that make up familiar objects behave in a slightly different way from their antimatter counterparts. While matter and antimatter have all of the same properties, antimatter particles carry charges that are the opposite of those in matter....

Carmen Rodríguez Santiago counts herself lucky to have any water service at home. But eight months after Hurricane Maria, the 52-year-old security guard said the faucets in her cream-and-pink-colored house still run dry every two to three days, and the water, when it returns, is flecked with sediment. Puerto Rican officials claim that water service on the U.S. island has been restored to more than 96 percent of customers as of June 6, but the report of progress masks underlying problems....

Last year, when researchers in Cambridge, Mass., announced that they had found a gene strongly linked to a higher risk of schizophrenia, the news media reacted with over-zealous enthusiasm. A “landmark study,” declared both the New York Times and the Washington Post. “Ground-breaking,” trumpeted CNN. Even the Economist dropped its normal reserve: “Genetics throws open a window on a perplexing disorder.” The hype was somewhat understandable. Historically, schizophrenia research has left a trail of disappointment....

Earlier this week scientists studying fossilized teeth from a hadrosaur revealed how the duck-billed dinosaur chewed plants for food. Now another team, analyzing what may be the most intact dinosaur mummy discovered yet, report fresh details about the skin of a hadrosaur nicknamed Dakota, which might have been bigger and moved more quickly than previously thought. “This is the closest you’ll get to touching an extinct dinosaur,” says Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester in England whose team is publishing its findings Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences....