All Stories by Bruce Bower
- Anthropology
Reservoirs of Evolution: Rainy periods linked to human origins in Africa
Three phases of heavy rainfall in eastern Africa between 2.7 million and 900,000 years ago created deep lakes and might have played a critical role in the evolution of human ancestors.
- Anthropology
The Human Wave
Anatomically modern people evolved in small groups of ancient Homo sapiens that never traveled too far but continually interbred with nearby groups, including other Homo species, creating a genetic wave that moved from Africa across Asia, a new model suggests.
-
Fickle Finger’s Funny Feel: Digit illusion modifies touch perception
The brain rapidly adjusts its internal map of the body's skin surface, according to a new study of people who underwent laboratory procedures that induced illusions of finger growth or shrinkage.
-
Bipolar kids harbor unique brain trait
Children and teenagers with bipolar disorder, a severe mental ailment that involves sharp mood swings, display unusually low tissue volume in a brain area involved in learning to regulate emotions.
- Archaeology
Judeo-Christian ties buried in Rome
New radiocarbon dates from one of ancient Rome's underground cemeteries, or catacombs, indicates that these structures were built in the Jewish community more than a century before early Christians started to do the same.
-
Reflections of Primate Minds: Mirror images strike monkeys as special
Capuchin monkeys don't react to their own mirror images as they do to strangers, perhaps reflecting an intermediate stage of being able to distinguish oneself from others.
- Anthropology
People fired up Aussie extinctions
Early Australian settlers may have altered the continent's landscape around 50,000 years ago, leading to the extinction of many animal species.
-
Hypnosis subdues the visual brain
Hypnotic suggestions to perceive written words as gibberish depress activity in brain areas responsible for vision, possibly reflecting a hypnosis-induced decline in attention paid to visual objects.
- Health & Medicine
Heartening Responses: Depression drugs may aid survival after heart attack
Depressed patients recovering from heart attacks receive big heart-health benefits by taking prescribed doses of the antidepressant drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
-
Night of the Crusher
Sleep paralysis, a kind of waking nightmare experienced by people in all cultures, sometimes plays a key role in post-traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks and contributes to widespread beliefs in various spirits and supernatural beings.
-
Mother Knows Worst: Abusive parenting spans generations in monkeys
Many female rhesus monkeys who were abused as infants by their mothers do the same to their own infants, raising the prospect of using these animals as a model for human child abuse.
-
Monkeys keep track of small numbers
Monkeys show signs of knowing when the number of faces that they see matches the number of voices that they hear, leading a research team to conclude that these primates possess basic counting skills.
