To some people that is a depressing realization. We are used to dismissing our fifth and sixth decades as a negative chapter in our lives, perhaps even a cause for crisis. But recent scientific findings have shown just how important middle age is for every one of us, and how crucial it has been to the success of our species. >>Read More

Psychologists have been building a sophisticated evolutionary understanding of so-called “normal” human behaviour for some decades now. But the study of psychiatric conditions has tended to focus more on proximate mechanisms to the exclusion of the evolutionary adaptive origins of those conditions. >>Read More

Combining the genes of two parents – rather than one in the case of fruit flies, stick insects and other animals – allows for damaging DNA to be removed within a few generations. >>Read More

These medical clinicians, biologists, and anthropologists are part of a cohort at Harvard, including several University-affiliated research centers, that may be unique in combining breadth and depth of research on the subject at a single university. >>Read More

The medical wisdom, at that time, based on a landmark 1960 study of institutionalized British children, was that puberty began, on average, for girls at age 11. But that was not what Herman-Giddens was seeing. So she started collecting data, eventually leading a study with the American Academy of Pediatrics that sampled 17,000 girls, finding that among white girls, the average age of breast budding was 9.96. Among black girls, it was 8.87. >>Read More

Dogs and humans release natural painkillers after running, but ordinarily sedentary ferrets that run do not. The chemical compounds may be an adaptation to reward the necessary behavior in running species. Christopher Intagliata reports >>Read More

Despite a natural range of just 100 meters (109 yards) and an evolutionary base near Pakistan, the house mouse has colonized every continent by stowing away in carts of hay or on ships. >>Read More