Clothes moth larvae snack on hair from corpses, providing police with genetic clues.

Learning mathematics may make the brain reorganize the way it works.

A blog entry on the Sussex Amateur Brain Surgery Club’s website boasts that “these days, brain surgery is very much the preserve of professional surgeons, but we at the Amateur Brain Surgery Club believe that anyone can do it, with a few basic tools and a little care.” The post is a spoof, but whoever penned those words may be on to something. The right tools could make treating the brain a simpler, less invasive process. Researchers have zeroed in on two such tools—sound waves and microscopic bubbles—that may eventually allow doctors to tackle a range of ... (p. 20)

Tasmanian devils have started mating much earlier in response to an epidemic, called facial tumor disease, that is wiping out much of their population.

Skulls of Neandertal ancestors show the prehistoric humans had a hearing capacity similar to present-day people, suggesting human speech could have originated much earlier than previously thought.

“What makes a man?” Flam, a science writer who pens a sex column for The Philadelphia Inquirer, seeks a scientific answer to this often-asked question. Her search takes her from a seduction boot camp for men to the labs of evolutionary biologists, sociologists and physiologists who study gender differences. From mushrooms with 30,000 sexes to sea worms that compete to be the male, Flam surveys the natural world to explain why human males evolved the way they did, revealing a riotous diversity in the way life begets life. While human males have one X and one Y chromosome, for inst...

Targeting a receptor on immune cells may hold promise for treating multiple sclerosis and asthma.

Color MRI scans may one day be possible, thanks to microscopic, tunable magnets.

Triassic-era sediments unearthed in Antarctica reveal the well-preserved lair of a four-legged, mammal-like reptile.

The smell of coffee leads to changes in gene activity in sleep-deprived rats, hinting at the molecular basis for the relaxing effect of the aroma seen in experiments.

Using a new method of data analysis, researchers have found that the Americas were peopled in two different migrations.