Dr. Mireault is a developmental psychologist at Vermont State University. My son was 14 weeks old when he made his first unmistakable whole-body belly laugh. In the months that followed, his laughter ...

Same-sex behaviors seem to be common among rhesus macaques. Charles J. Sharp via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0 Humans aren’t the only creatures engaging in same-sex sexual activities. To date, ...

The molecular clock theory posits that genetic changes happen steadily and gradually, offering a reliable means for peering into the past and theorizing when complex life first emerged. However, there ...

Gordon Burghardt kept a lion cub named Meg in his home at the behest of the Knoxville Zoo. To help Meg get out some energy, Burghardt and his wife would often play with Meg in their wooded, unfenced ...

My little theory is that the concept of “imprinting” in psychology can just as easily be applied to programming: Much as a baby goose decides that the first moving life-form it encounters is its ...

What if you could strip away the layers of abstraction that operating systems impose and interact directly with your computer’s hardware? Imagine crafting a program where every instruction is executed ...

A paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution finds that the relatively high rate of autism-spectrum disorders in humans is likely due to how humans evolved in the past. The paper is titled "A general ...

Modern humans are evolutionary survivors, thriving generation after generation while our ancient relatives died out. Now, new research into our brain chemistry suggests that an enzyme unique to Homo ...

Low-code and modular programming environments are transforming PLC programming, with vendors providing pre-packaged libraries and objects that eliminate traditional IEC-61131-3 style coding, allowing ...

Digital reconstruction of tiny, 400-million-year-old jawless fish shows how traits for evading predators later gave rise to hunters A fossil the size of a fingernail is rewriting the opening chapter ...

Assembly Theory is a way to understand how the complexity of life emerged through a mechanism of “self-assembly.” It could explain how life formed on Earth—or other planets—via the shortest path to ...

A group of scientists studying pregnancy across six different mammals—from humans to marsupials—uncovered how certain cells at the mother-baby boundary have been working together for over 100 million ...