Third cousin couples have the most children and grandchildren

Marriage between closely related cousins is a heavy taboo in many cultures and its critics often cite the higher risk of genetic diseases associated with inbreeding. That risk is certainly apparent for very close relatives, but a new study from Iceland shows that very distant relatives don’t have it easy either. In the long run, [...]

Predicting ethnic violence – why good neighbours need good fences

Everybody, apparently, needs good neighbours, but in many parts of the world, your neighbours can be your worst enemy. In the past century, more than 100 million people have lost their lives to violent conflicts. Most of these were fought between groups of people living physically side by side, but separated by culture or ethnicity. [...]

Five-month-old babies prefer their own languages and shun foreign accents

Discriminating against people who do not speak your language is a big problem. A new study suggests that the preferences that lead to these problems are hard-wired at a very young age. Even five-month-old infants, who can’t speak themselves, have preferences for native speakers and native accents. The human talent for language is one of [...]

Are women more talkative than men?

In 2006, a best-selling book claimed that women are over three times more talkative than men. But a new study, the first to actually measure how many words men and women say in natural conversations, has resigned this statistic to the urban myth bin. In ‘The Female Brain’, author Louann Brizendine stated that women use [...]

In conflicts over beliefs and values, symbolic gestures matter more than reason or money

When battles are waged over values and ideologies, you can’t bribe or reason your way to peace. That’s the stark message from a new psychological study of people in the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The fight over the land of Israel/Palestine has raged for over a century and the peace process has been difficult, [...]

Chimps have more adaptive genetic changes than humans

According to new research, chimpanzee genes have shown more adaptive changes than those of humans. The media widely reported the results as evidence that chimps are ‘more evolved’ than humans. But as I discuss here, these headlines are putting words into the researchers’ mouths. Since the time when humans and chimps evolved from our common [...]

Discovery of ‘fat gene’ highlights stigma against obese people

On Friday, the media was abuzz with the discovery of a ‘gene for obesity’. Researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust found that people who carry a single copy of a variant of the FTO gene are 30% more likely to be obese than people with no copies. But one in six Europeans carry two copies [...]

Tell me what you think about this website

To any and all readers: I’ve been writing for Not Exactly Rocket Science for about 9 months now and am enjoying it more than ever. What I want to know is: what do you think about it? What do you think about the site design, the topics covered, my writing style, etc. etc? What works [...]

Shark-hunting harms animals at bottom of the food chain

Overfishing has disproportionately reduces the numbers of the ocean’s ‘apex predators’ and large sharks are disappearing particularly fast. Their absence allows their prey to flourish and the consequences of that can be disastrous for animals at the bottom of the food chain, and the humans that depend on them. On the surface, plummeting populations of [...]

Loss of traditional knowledge in the Amazon leads to poorer child health

In the heart of Bolivia, an Amazonian society is losing its traditional knowledge of the medicinal value of local plants, to the detriment of its children’s health. The Tsimane’ are a small seven thousand-strong population, living in a lowland region of Bolivia, who possess tremendous knowledge about the plants they share their forest with. Their [...]

Opinion: Not so unique – the chimpanzee Stone Age, and our place among intelligent animals

This is the 50th article for this blog. I’ve been writing for it for over six months now, and I pleasantly surprised that I’m still finding the enthusiasm to write for it regularly, and that people seem to be reading it. This special article considers new evidence for the origins of chimpanzee tool use. It [...]

Review – Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande

Science is very much a work in progress, where unanswered questions are accepted and experimentation is encouraged. But in medicine, where lives are at stake, things are very different. We look for doctors and surgeons to be faultlessly skilled and well-informed, and for medicine to be a field of order, knowledge and procedure. In Complications, [...]