It’s not every day we get to see the tiny world that exists beyond our vision, but that’s what the Nikon Small World in Motion competition is all about. This is the 14th year of the competition, where past winners revealed extraordinary insights into things like the stomach contents of a termite, human cells fusing and dying during … Read more
An invasive sea creature with a disappearing anus and a penchant for cannabalizing its own young may have yet another trick up its sleeve. When life is going badly for the sea walnut, it will shrink and take on the shape of its larval form, and stay that way until things are looking up again, according … Read more
As It Happens6:21Giant scorpions once ruled seas — and may have traversed entire oceans Asked to rank giant sea scorpions on a scale of one to terrifying, Russell Bicknell puts them at about an eight. “I suppose it depends how you define terrifying,” Bicknell, a paleobiologist at the American Museum of Natural History, told As … Read more
Why do humans live so long? A new study suggests a mother’s care could be a major part of it. The study, out of Cornell University, says that the reason humans and other primates live so long can be at least partly explained by the mother-child relationship. Maternal care leads to the evolution of “long, slow lives,” … Read more
The natural world is full of gender diversity: female hyenas have pseudo penises used for sex and urination, many species of fish and plants change their sex over their lifespan, and female lions have been known to grow manes and develop a masculine growl. Those are among many examples in a new episode of CBC’s The Nature … Read more
Archaeologists have been trying to piece together the full human story for a long time, but some members of prehistoric societies have been largely overlooked: kids! It turns out these little people played a much bigger part in human history than we realized. In Little Sapiens, a documentary from The Nature of Things, Sarika Cullis-Suzuki … Read more
As It Happens6:24Great apes get a kick out of ‘playfully teasing’ each other, study finds What do you call it when a chimpanzee offers his buddy a delicious piece of fruit only to pull his hand away at the last second? Or when a bonobo repeatedly pokes, prods and pulls on the hair of an … Read more
As It Happens6:35How scientists tracked the 1,000 km journey of a woolly mammoth using its tusk With nothing more than a tusk, researchers were able to track the 1,000 kilometre journey of a woolly mammoth that lived 14,000 years ago. “The fact that we can actually regenerate her movement, her place along a landscape … … Read more
The 2013 discovery of the largest collection of hominid fossils ever found is rewriting the origin of complex behaviours we thought were uniquely human, says a renowned paleoanthropologist. The fossilized bones belonged to an entirely new species of ancient human relatives called, Homo naledi, which lived in South Africa several hundred thousand years ago when the first Homo … Read more
As It Happens6:28Why do these mosquitos keep perching on the nostrils of frogs who want to eat them? John Gould had been snapping pictures of mosquitoes on frogs for years before he noticed a trend — the bloodsuckers always seem to land right on the amphibians’ noses. “You would think that a frog would be … Read more
