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
As It Happens6:32The mating dance of sea fireflies is ‘the coolest fireworks show that you’ve ever seen’: scientist Nicholai Hensley has spent countless hours standing waist-deep in pitch-black waters off the coast of Panama, watching thousands of tiny sea creatures perform dazzling displays of bright blue light. The creatures — each the size of a … Read more
Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are killed annually by malaria and other diseases spread through the bite of mosquitoes, insects that date back to the age of dinosaurs. All of these bites are inflicted by females, which possess specialized mouth anatomy that their male counterparts lack. But it hasn’t always been that way. Researchers … Read more
