Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis occurred, where life emerged from non-life. Imagine a hot, watery mix of ...

AI safety, autonomous scientific research, and AI and consciousness. Thinking about the social mechanisms that support the ...

Unfortunately, this book can't be printed from the OpenBook. If you need to print pages from this book, we recommend downloading it as a PDF. Visit NAP.edu/10766 to get more information about this ...

The transformation of the human body has been a recurring concern of science fiction for more than 200 years. It has ...

Explore the emerging human augmentation technologies unveiled at EmTech Future this week, including nanotechnology, exoskeletons and assistive robotics.

A study of 225 newborns suggests prenatal estrogen may have played a role in the evolution of larger human brains. Boys with finger-length patterns linked to higher estrogen exposure before birth ...

Humans' exposure to high temperature burn injuries may have played an important role in our evolutionary development, shaping how our bodies heal, fight infection, and sometimes fail under extreme ...

Human and chimpanzee genomes are more than 98% identical, and the genes themselves barely differ. The changes that make us human are thought to hide instead in the DNA that controls when and where ...

Learn how early humans evolved at a much faster rate than other apes, adapting larger brains as they developed new ways to socialize. Skull diversity across great apes (orange) and gibbons (blue).