Pocket Archive: Science, History & Discovery

Modern humans and more ancient hominins interbred many times throughout Eurasia and Africa, and the genetic flow went both ways.

Archaeologists find the world's oldest fish hooks in a cave on the Japanese island of Okinawa, dating from about 23,000 years ago.

Our two free downloadable cover letter templates will take some of the agony out of customizing your cover letter each time—and help you land interviews.

This article summarizes the ideas of Daniel Quinn , first written about in The Story of B, which was a sequel to Ishmael. The longer, original essay can be read here , and comes highly recommended, especially if you find yourself disagreeing with the summary below. Most disagreements we've read about have turned out to be...

Western lifestyles differ markedly from those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and these differences in diet and activity level are often implicated in the global obesity pandemic. However, few physiological data for hunter-gatherer populations are available to test these models of obesity. In this study, we used the doubly-labeled water method to measure total daily energy expenditure (kCal/day) in Hadza hunter-gatherers to test whether foragers expend more energy each day than their Western counterparts. As expected, physical activity level, PAL, was greater among Hadza foragers than among Westerners. Nonetheless, average daily energy expenditure of traditional Hadza foragers was no different than that of Westerners after controlling for body size. The metabolic cost of walking (kcal kg−1 m−1) and resting (kcal kg−1 s−1) were also similar among Hadza and Western groups. The similarity in metabolic rates across a broad range of cultures challenges current models of obesity suggesting that Western lifestyles lead to decreased energy expenditure. We hypothesize that human daily energy expenditure may be an evolved physiological trait largely independent of cultural differences.

The Citizen Hearing on Disclosure set out to accomplish what the U. S. Congress had failed to do for forty-five years - seek out the facts surrounding the most important issue of this or any other time - evidence pointing toward an...

We can’t see them, but they are all around us. On us. In us. Our personal microbes have us outnumbered by orders of magnitude, but scientists are only beginning to understand how they influence our health and other aspects of our lives. It’s an increasingly hot area of science, though, and this past year saw lots of interesting developments. Here are some of the highlights.