Across much of the United States, spring is in full force. With warmer weather, people are taking their furry family members out on longer walks and spending more time outside. Alongside blooming flowers and trees, your pet might run into a small, unassuming grass seed pod known as a foxtail[1]. Despite the cute name, foxtails can pose a...
Playing with the kids is important work for chimpanzee mothers
Wild chimpanzees have been studied for more than 60 years[1], but they continue to delight and surprise observers, as we found during the summer of 2017 in Kibale National Park in Uganda.
We were observing young chimpanzees’ play to better understand how they grow up. For most group-living animals, play is an integral component of...
Read more https://theconversation.com/playing-with-the-kids-is-important-work-for-chimpanzee-mothers-229332
Everyday life and its variability influenced human evolution at least as much as rare activities like big-game hunting
Think about taking a walk: where you need to go, how fast you need to move to get there, and whether you need to bring something along to carry the results of your errand.
Are you going on this walk with someone else? Does walking with a friend change your preparation? If you’re walking with a child, do you remember to bring an...
Exoplanet WASP-69b has a cometlike tail – this unique feature is helping scientists like me learn more about how planets evolve
Located 163 light-years from Earth, a Jupiter-sized exoplanet named WASP-69b[1] offers astrophysicists a window into the dynamic processes that shape planets across the galaxy. The star it orbits is baking and stripping away the planet’s atmosphere, and that escaped atmosphere is being sculpted by the star into a vast, cometlike tail at least...