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Compared with other mammals, and along with those of a few other notably bright creatures—dolphins, whales and elephants among them—the brain to body-size ratios of monkeys, apes and humans are among the highest. For decades the prevailing evolutionary explanation for this was increasing social complexity. The so-called “social brain hypothesis” holds that the pressures and nuances of interacting and functioning within a group gradually boosted brain size. Yet new research suggests otherwise....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. For a long time, medieval medicine has been dismissed as irrelevant. This time period is popularly referred to as the “Dark Ages,” which erroneously suggests that it was unenlightened by science or reason. However, some medievalists and scientists are now looking back to history for clues to inform the search for new antibiotics. The evolution of antibiotic-resistant microbes means that it is always necessary to find new drugs to battle microbes that are no longer treatable with current antibiotics....

I leave a note for duty officers on the chart table of the container ship Kendal. It says, “Watch keepers, if you see whales or dolphins, please call me on 227.” For days, southward slowly through the Indian Ocean, grazing India, heading for Sri Lanka, the note reaps nothing. But one day the crew member Marius says with careful innocence, “I saw whales the other day, and hundreds of dolphins.” I ask him what kind of whales....

Online sites such as BuzzFeed and Pinterest are full of “hacks” that provide solutions to common problems by using everyday objects in uncommon ways, like protecting a razor head with a binder clip or wrapping shoes in a shower cap for travel. These ingenious ideas are the result of divergent thinking (DT)—an outside-the-box approach that generates unusual or creative alternatives to persistent challenges. DT drives adaptive innovation and is important when problems require a shift in perspective or the development of flexible, original solutions....

Astronomers have crowned the universe’s largest known spiral galaxy, a spectacular behemoth five times bigger than our own Milky Way. The title-holder is now NGC 6872, a barred spiral found 212 million light-years away in the southern constellation Pavo, researchers announced today (Jan. 10). The distance between NGC 6872’s two huge spiral arms is 522,000 light-years, compared to about 100,000 light-years for the Milky Way. NGC 6872 has ranked among the largest known spiral galaxies for decades....

Practically every new rover, lander or orbiter sent to Mars in recent years turns up more evidence of water, both past and present. This vital liquid is necessary for life as we know it, but whether anything has ever lived on Mars is still a mystery. This week scientists reported new findings of water on the Red Planet that bring us closer than ever to finally answering the question. The Curiosity rover’s landing site on Mars, Gale Crater, used to hold a lake, scientists announced on Monday at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco....

Under an international program begun in 2000, and that started producing useful global data in 2005, the world’s warming and acidifying seas have been invisibly filled with thousands of these bobbing instruments. They are gathering and transmitting data that’s providing scientists with the clearest-ever pictures of the hitherto-unfathomed extent of ocean warming. About 90 percent of global warming is ending up not on land, but in the oceans. Research published Sunday concluded that the upper 2,300 feet of the Southern Hemisphere’s oceans may have warmed twice as quickly after 1970 than had previously been thought....

More than five million people in the U.S. have Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists at Harvard Medical School and their colleagues have made a breakthrough that could lead to a treatment for this currently incurable disease. Much research on Alzheimer’s has been directed at understanding the abnormally folded and entangled proteins in the brain that are key symptoms of the illness. Until now, though, scientists have been stumped to explain why many people with these anomalies do not develop the disease....

By Natasha Gilbert of Nature magazineForests are vital to the livelihoods of millions of people in developing countries, providing on average more than one-fifth of their annual income, according to data presented today at a meeting in London.The study provides much-needed solid evidence for the importance of forests to the world’s rural poor. It also overturns some existing assumptions, showing, for example, that forests provide vital income to whole communities, not just the poorest, and that richer households are most likely to contribute to deforestation....

The link between a mother and child is profound, and new research suggests a physical connection even deeper than anyone thought. The profound psychological and physical bonds shared by the mother and her child begin during gestation when the mother is everything for the developing fetus, supplying warmth and sustenance, while her heartbeat provides a soothing constant rhythm. The physical connection between mother and fetus is provided by the placenta, an organ, built of cells from both the mother and fetus, which serves as a conduit for the exchange of nutrients, gasses, and wastes....

Over little more than a year, hundreds of Indian scientists have repeatedly come together to express concern about the Modi government’s actions in Kashmir, its attempt to redefine citizenship and its persecution of dissident intellectuals. The Indian scientific community has historically been reluctant to intervene in broader social debates. So, the fact that so many scientists have felt compelled to speak out highlights the Modi government’s divisive agenda and its impact on the Indian academic community....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Safety is imperative before new medicines are given to patients—which is why drugs are tested on millions of animals worldwide each year to detect possible risks and side effects. But research shows computer simulations of the heart have the potential to improve drug development for patients and reduce the need for animal testing. Animal testing has, to date, been the most accurate and reliable strategy for checking new drugs, but it is expensive, time consuming and—for some—highly controversial....

In many respects, scientists are much like detectives, solving mysteries by sifting through evidence in search of cluelike patterns. For example, any crystal, whether a granule of table salt or a diamond necklace, is just a bunch of atoms arranged in a repeating pattern. By glimpsing only a few of the crystal’s patterned atoms, a sleuth may surmise where all the others should be. But what if that pattern was spread across time rather than space, with the pattern’s constituents related by “when” instead of “where”?...

MEDFORD, Mass. — They look like little more than grayish-black grains of couscous floating in water. But they are actually African clawed frogs-to-be, replete with minuscule blobs that will become eyes. “These little beans here are what I do the surgery on,” said Douglas Blackiston, a postdoctoral fellow at Tufts University’s Allen Discovery Center, holding out a Petri dish. On Thursday, Blackiston published the results of a few years’ worth of those microscopic surgeries, and the finding is bizarre: If you transplant an eye onto what will become the tadpole’s tail, that organ — misplaced though it may be — can allow the animal to see....

An active severe weather season is anticipated in the U.S. during spring of 2012 with the most widespread warmth since 2004. “As far as the forecast for the spring of 2012, we do feel like it’s going to be a mild spring for most of the nation from the eastern Rockies into the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes area,” Paul Pastelok, expert long-range meteorologist and leader of the AccuWeather.com Long-Range Forecasting Team, said....

President Trump officially entered office Friday, erasing mentions of climate change from the White House website and replacing them with vows to increase fossil fuel development. But Trump has yet to take the immediate action he promised on the campaign trail to reverse the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The rule — which is on hold under a Supreme Court stay — could take years to unravel, although Trump could soon issue an executive order directing U....

In the last few years, a handful of scholars have begun to look more closely at Shakespeare’s interest in the scientific discoveries of his time—asking what he knew, when he knew it, and how that knowledge might be reflected in his work. Scott Maisano at the University of Massachusetts–Boston, for example, has written extensively on the evidence for Shakespeare’s awareness of the science of his day, and for its influence on his plays, especially the late romances....

These are boom times for astronomers hunting black holes. The biggest ones—supermassive black holes that can weigh billions of suns—have been found at the centers of most every galaxy, and we have even managed to image one. Meanwhile, researchers now routinely detect gravitational waves rippling through the universe from smaller merging black holes. Closer to home, we have witnessed the dramatic celestial fireworks produced when the Milky Way’s own supermassive black hole and its more diminutive cousins feed on gas clouds or even entire stars....

Originally posted on SoapBox Science, a community guest blog from Nature.com Marcus du Sautoy, OBE, is the Simonyi Professor for Public Understanding of Science and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He is known for his efforts in popularizing mathematics and has been named by The Independent on Sunday as one of the UK’s leading scientists. He was a recipient of the London Mathematical Society’s prestigious Berwick Prize in 2001, which is awarded every two years to reward the best mathematical research by a mathematician under forty....

During an embryo’s development, a piece of the still-growing brain branches off to form the retina, a sliver of tissue in the back of the eye. This makes the retina, which is composed of several layers of neurons, a piece of the central nervous system. As evidence builds that changes in the brain can manifest in this region, scientists are turning to retinas as a potential screening target for early signs of Alzheimer’s, an incurable neurodegenerative disease that affects an estimated six million people in the U....