This week’s most popular articles were surprisingly all about varoius aspects humanity, from the biological to the psychological and even venturing into our dreams.
So, without further ado, here are this week’s most popular stories on Science Rocks My World as voted by your clicks:
Regeneration Could be Lurking in Our Genes
If you trace our evolutionary tree way back to its roots—long before the shedding of gills or the development of opposable thumbs—you will likely find a common ancestor with the amazing ability to regenerate lost body parts.
Lucky descendants of this creature, including today’s salamanders or zebrafish, can still perform the feat, but humans lost much of their regenerative power over millions of years of evolution.
In an effort to understand what was lost, researchers have built a running list of the genes that enable regenerating animals to grow back a severed tail or repair damaged tissues. Surprisingly, they have found that genes important for regeneration in these creatures also have counterparts in humans…
Human History Tells Us That We are an Invasive Species
Human populations have not always grown unchecked. A new study of South America’s colonization finds that for much of human history on the continent, human populations grew like an invasive species, which is regulated by the environment as it spreads into new places.
Populations grew exponentially when people first colonized South America. But then they crashed, recovered slightly, and plateaued for thousands of years after over-consuming local natural resources and reaching continental carrying capacity, according to the analysis…
10 Amazing Facts About Dreams [Video]
Everyone dreams every night (except for some people with very rare sleep disorders), but most people don’t remember their dreams for very long, so many believe that they don’t dream some nights when science has shown that isn’t the case. Science still has no answer to the question of why we dream…
How playing video games can change your retirement
The teenagers who were hooked on Pac-Man in the arcades and amusement parks of the early 1970s are getting ready for retirement, but many of them have never stopped playing video games. In fact, it doesn’t look like they are going to stop gaming anytime soon.
The percentage of U.S. gamers who are over age 50 has increased rapidly, from just 9 percent in 1999 to 27 percent in 2015, according to the Entertainment Software Association’s annual reports. This is a global trend…
How sexually transmitted diseases might have driven the evolution of monogamy
Exactly why so many humans choose monogamous pair bonds over juggling multiple partners has long been a mystery to scientists. After all, having several partners at the same time should lead to more offspring – an outcome you’d think evolution would favour. Now a new study has linked the phenomenon to sexually transmitted diseases, arguing that monogamy could have evolved because it offered protection against the threat of infection…
Consensus confirmed: over 90% of climate scientists believe we’re causing global warming [Video]
When we published a paper in 2013 finding 97% scientific consensus on human-caused global warming, what surprised me was how surprised everyone was.
Ours wasn’t the first study to find such a scientific consensus. Nor was it the second. Nor were we the last.
Nevertheless, no-one I spoke to was aware of the existing research into such a consensus. Rather, the public thought there was a 50:50 debate among scientists on the basic question of whether human activity was causing global warming.
Also Trending This Week, Check Out:
- How Nanotubes Can Self-Assemble into Tiny Wires [Video]
- How could we build an invisibility cloak to hide Earth from an alien civilization?
- How a Person’s Own Body Fat Could One Day Treat Diabetes
- Tiny flea reveals the devastating costs of invasive species
- Will we soon see another wave of bird extinctions in the Americas?
- [Video] Here’s the Technology that NASA will use to Build Spacecraft that Ride the Solar Wind