Bruce Bower

Bruce Bower

Behavioral Sciences Writer

Bruce Bower has written about the behavioral sciences since 1984. He often writes about psychology, anthropology, archaeology and mental health issues. Bruce has a master's degree in psychology from Pepperdine University and a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. Following an internship at Science News in 1981, he worked as a reporter at Psychiatric News, a publication of the American Psychiatric Association, until joining Science News as a staff writer. In 1996, the American Psychological Association appointed Bruce a Science Writer Fellow, with a grant to visit psychological scientists of his own choosing. Early stints as an aide in a day school for children and teenagers with severe psychological problems and as a counselor in a drug diversion center provided Bruce with a surprisingly good background for a career in science journalism.

All Stories by Bruce Bower

  1. Neurons slow down for placebo effect

    A placebo treatment temporarily quelled symptoms of Parkinson's disease in six people by decreasing the electrical activity of brain cells crucial to the condition.

  2. Anthropology

    Humanity’s Strange Face

    New fossil finds in a Romanian cave fuel controversy over whether different, closely related species interbred on the evolutionary path that led to people.

  3. Toddlers’ Supersize Mistakes: At times, children play with the impossible

    Toddlers will sometimes try to climb into a toy car or otherwise treat small objects as if they were large ones, possibly because their brains occasionally fail to integrate visual information about object size with object identity.

  4. Anthropology

    Neandertals may have grown up quickly

    A new analysis of fossil teeth indicates that Neandertals grew to maturity at a faster pace than people do.

  5. Words in the Brain: Reading program spurs neural rewrite in kids

    Children who are deficient readers show improvement in both reading skills and brain function when given intensive instruction in how written letters correspond to speech sounds, a brain-imaging study finds.

  6. Brain roots of music depreciation

    The brains of tone-deaf people may be unable to detect subtle shifts in pitch, which keeps them from learning the basic structure of musical passages.

  7. Teen Brains on Trial

    Scientific opinions differ about whether evidence on delayed maturation of the adolescent brain should be used to argue that teenagers have reduced culpability for crimes and thus should be exempt from the death penalty.

  8. Archaeology

    Stone Age Combustion: Fire use proposed at ancient Israeli site

    A Stone Age site in Israel contains the oldest evidence of controlled fire use in Asia or Europe, from around 750,000 years ago, a research team reports.

  9. Anthropology

    ‘Y guy’ steps into human-evolution debate

    The common ancestor of today's males lived in Africa between 35,000 and 89,000 years ago, according to a contested DNA analysis.

  10. Archaeology

    Agriculture’s roots go tropical

    Tropical-forest dwellers in Central America may have cultivated manioc and other root crops as many as 7,000 years ago.

  11. Archaeology

    Early farmers crop up in Jordan

    An ancient site discovered in southern Jordan dating back more than 9,000 years may help to illuminate the origins of farming in the Middle East.

  12. Culture of the Sea

    Whales and dolphins strut their social stuff for scientists.