Think your DNA is 100 percent Homo sapiens? Think again. A recent study in the journal Nature reports that at least 40 million years ago, our primate ancestors "invited" a gene from an infecting virus into their genomes. Because this phenomenon adds novelty to a species' DNA makeup, it may represent a newly discovered mode of evolutionary change.
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Talk about a high-fiber diet: the newest member of the human family, Australopithecus sediba, ate enough bark, leaves, and fruit that its appetite was more like that of a chimpanzee's than a human's. 
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It's my belief that only experiencing and understanding truly disembodied cognition, only seeing the coldness and deadness and disconnectedness of something that truly does deal in pure abstraction, divorced from sensory reality, only this can snap us out of it. Only this can bring us, quite literally, back to our senses.
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To the scientists’ surprise, this creature lived at the same time and in the same region as Australopithecus afarensis, a hominid species best known for a partial skeleton dubbed Lucy. Another recent fossil discovery in Ethiopia suggests that Lucy’s kind walked much as people do today (SN: 7/17/10, p. 5).
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This skull has a weird mix of ancient and modern traits. It was discovered in a cave in southwest China and dates to between 14,500 and 11,500 years ago.
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Biological research increasingly debunks the view of humanity as competitive, aggressive and brutish, a leading specialist in primate behavior told a major science conference Monday.
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Intelligent life may be in it's "very young" stage in the observable Universe. Its 200 billion galaxies show a clear potential to continue on as we see them today for hundreds of billions of years, if not much longer. Because planets and life are so young in our Universe, says Harvard's Dimitar Sasselov, perhaps "the human species are not late comers to the party. We may be among the early ones."
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Areas of inquiry once reserved for historians and social scientists are now studied by neuroscientists, and among the most fascinating is cultural conflict.
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How did one ape 45,000 years ago happen to turn into a planet dominator? The answer lies in an epochal collision of creativity.
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When a virtual human is controlled by an actual human’s behaviours in real time, it is an avatar, by definition. If it is controlled by a computer, it is an agent. However, the notions of doppelgängers challenge these definitions, by begging the question, ‘If it looks just like me in every way but is controlled by a computer algorithm, is it really just an agent?’ Strictly speaking, the answer to this questions is ‘yes’. However, the notion of self is fluid in virtual reality. The same holds for people in the physical world, but to a lesser extent. ‘I wasn’t myself when I said that!’ is an excuse people often give for some transgression. The possibilities for self-representations are many in virtual reality, and scholars are just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding the implications of these new technologies for who we are and how we act as humans. There are many unknowns about these doppelgängers – for example, how long the effect lasts, how it interacts among people who vary across cultures and personality type, and what is the exact psychological mechanisms behind the process. As the technologies to build avatars move from the laboratory into the living room the need to answer these pressing questions will be more pronounced.
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With current propulsion technology only able to move spacecraft at 0.005% of the speed of light, a one-way trip to the star system nearest our Sun, Alpha Centauri, would take 80,000 years to travel the four light-years to our nearest...
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Can cells become little computers? And how does technological progress challenge our ideas about free will, intelligence, and the purpose of human life? Martin Eiermann sat down with the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram to discuss these questions.
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What are the signs of intelligence? Articles about INTELLIGENCE: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?tag=intelligence
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There has been some speculation for a while now that the neural mechanisms that help support this fine tuned coordination and control for throwing might also be just the kind of resources that could support the development of spoken language.
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In one sense, the main theme of the Being Human conference was “illusion.” Illusions occur when what we perceive does not match with the true state of the world. When our thoughts do not accurately reflect objective reality. Visual illusions make this obvious, and we usually enjoy them. We see one white square and one black square, but they turn out to truly be the same shade of grey. Or two lines of equal length appear to be different. A waterfall flows ever downward yet somehow also falls up.
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The fundamental issue with this question is that there is an assumption that humans evolved from apes - but this is not the case. The simple answer is that humans did not evolve from apes: both apes, humans, and other primates evolved from a common ancestor. The common ancestor was probably more similar to apes than humans in terms of appearance. It is estimated that this lineage branched apart 8 million years ago - one branch leading to homonids (human-like), and the other branch leading to apes. This estimate varies - some arguing the split was as close as 5 million years ago, others that it was as distant as 20 million years ago.
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Scientists have completed the genome sequence of a Denisovan, a representative of an Asian group of extinct humans related to Neanderthals.
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THE problem with understanding human uniqueness is precisely that it is unique. Though the proper study of mankind may be man, that study will yield little if there is no reference point to compare man with.
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A new study, using genetic analysis to look for clues about human migration over sixty thousand years ago, suggests that the first modern humans settled in Arabia on their way from the Horn of Africa to the rest of the world.
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Human brains have shrunk over the past 30,000 years, puzzling scientists who argue it is not a sign we are growing dumber but that evolution is making the key motor leaner and more efficient.
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Most scientists believe that human beings evolved in Africa, then migrated from the continent to conquer the world. But researchers from the University of Tubingen in Germany believe that our ancestry might be more complicated - and significant parts of human evolution might have happened in Europe and Western Asia.
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Why are the faces of primates so dramatically different from one another?
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Other than Olympic race walkers, people generally find it more comfortable to run than walk when they start moving at around 2 meters per second – about 4.5 miles per hour.
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