When we listen to someone talking, we hear some sounds that combine to make words and other sounds that convey such things as the speaker’s emotions and gender. The left hemisphere of our brain manages the first task, while the right hemisphere specializes in the second. Dogs also have this kind of

Metastatic lung cancer is hard to treat. So if there were a treatment for people with the disease that had minimal side effects, could extend not just the quantity of life but also its quality, we’d expect it to be a blockbuster. There is indeed such a treatment, as described in research published

An asteroid impact that wiped out hundreds of millions of people would barely slow down human population growth. That’s one of the surprising results of a new computer model, which still finds that there may be a couple of things we can do to keep our numbers in check. Every dozen years or so, we

If you want to figure out how many people live in a particular part of your country, you could spend years conducting home visits and mailing out questionnaires. But a new study describes a quicker way. Scientists have figured out how to map populations using cellphone records—an approach that

Scanning the skies for near-earth asteroids might be the best first step for getting humans to Mars. In a comment article in the Oct. 30 Nature, MIT planetary scientist Richard Binzel argues that NASA should abandon the Asteroid Redirect Mission, the space agency’s plan to snag a space rock and