Aeon
Viewpoint: How birds help us better understand human infancy
To understand helpless human babies, our big brains and oddly involved dads, look to the evolution of birds not mammals ...
Do dogs ponder the future? Here’s what we can learn from animal dreams
Other animals may not ponder deep, existential questions, but the fact that they dream proves that they possess formidable memories ...
How can we deal with information overload?
Neuroergonomics researchers are looking at what can be done to break through the chaos. They are following what happens in ...
Unlocking the mystery of why we sleep
We spend approximately a third of our life sleeping, yet we don’t know why we need to. And if we ...
How do animals react when danger and death threaten?
Our concept of death is one of those characteristics, like culture, rationality, language or morality, that have traditionally been taken ...
‘It’s all in your head’: Do thinking and feeling really happen in the brain?
Someone’s probably told you before that something you thought, felt or feared was ‘all in your mind’. I’m here to ...
How grief overwhelms and transforms who we are
Grief has such a powerful effect on us, I learned, that it rewires the brain: the limbic system, a primal ...
Insect farming is all the rage. Here’s why it might not be such a good idea
Interest in insect farming is booming. Insects have been heralded as a sustainable alternative to traditional animal agriculture, with a ...
Deep brain stimulation not only treats psychiatric issues, it can boost confidence and openness
[W]hy, exactly, is [deep brain stimulation, or] DBS so transformative – not just eliminating OCD symptoms, but increasing self-confidence and ...
Viewpoint: Psychology is more mythology than hard science
In our secular age, many people no longer turn to sacred books to understand who and what they are. Psychology ...
What was life like for Neanderthal women?
Neanderthal women very likely did hunt some or much of the smaller game we find in sites, such as tortoise, ...
How extensively did the Vikings explore the Americas a millennium ago?
Around the year 1000, Leif Erikson set sail from Greenland and landed first in ‘Stone-slab land’, then ‘Forest land’ and ...
Viewpoint: There are only two sexes. That doesn’t invalidate the biological reality of transgenderism
There’s no need to reject how biologists define the sexes to defend the view that trans women are women. When ...
What caused anatomically modern Homo sapiens to evolve into behaviorally modern people?
At some point, from around 40,000 years ago in Europe, we see evidence of these behaviourally modern humans in a ...
What physicists get wrong about free will
It might seem that everything that’s happening at the higher, ‘emergent’ levels should be uniquely determined by the physics operating ...
Were the mythical ‘ebu gogo’ creatures of Indonesia distant human relatives?
An ancient legend from the Indonesian island of Flores speaks of a mysterious, wild grandmother of the forest who eats ...
Deconstructing the idea that consciousness is a ‘spooky’ illusion
These days it is highly fashionable to label consciousness an ‘illusion’. This in turn fosters the impression, especially among the ...
Viewpoint: Neurodiversity movement hurts people with autism by ‘romanticizing’ the disorder
In the past decade, neurodiversity’s popularity has grown enormously, largely because of the buzz surrounding Steve Silberman’s book NeuroTribes (2015). Today, the ...
‘Homo gluttonous’: Could the history of our meat-eating, over-consuming species threaten the planet?
During our hunter-gatherer past, which constitutes 99 per cent of our history as a species, ... omnivorous tastes served us ...
Is the world facing ecological collapse? Not if we ‘engineer our environment’ more productively
In a recent Nature Sustainability paper, a team of scientists concluded that the Earth can sustain, at most, only 7 billion ...
Revising human history: Asian paleoanthropology reveals human, Neanderthal relationships
[T]he first analyses of Neanderthal DNA seemed to indicate that Neanderthals and modern humans did not interbreed. But this popular ...
Searching for life in 3-billion-year-old fossils: Will we know it when we see it?
Geologists examining fossils in rocks help us to gain purchase on the conundrum of what constitutes life by identifying its ...
How plants learn and use memories for prediction and decision-making
[Editor's note: Laura Ruggles is a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide in Australia.] The idea that plants can ...
Viewpoint: Is having children immoral?
[Editor's note: David Benatar is a professor of philosophy and head of the department of philosophy at the University of Cape Town, ...
Is scientific neutrality being lost to commercialism?
In the past few decades, the life sciences have been transformed into gigantic bio-technosciences, blurring the boundaries between science and ...
Does human life have meaning in an unfathomably vast universe?
Humanity is nothing more than a microscopic blip in the universe. But does that mean we are insignificant? … The ...
‘All natural fetish’ fuels ‘counter-rationalist mindset’ on GMOs in Vermont
Immersed as we are in these exquisite pastoral gifts, Vermonters tend to forget that Mother Nature might be lovely, but ...
Evolutionary survival mechanism ‘gone-awry’ likely source of sleep walking
Recent research from Stanford University shows that up to 4 per cent of adults might have [walked in their sleep] ...