In the course of my research for the ape strength article, I ran across an old piece from The Atlantic Monthly, in which Alexander Young gives a long satire describing "a visit" to P. T. Barnum's "gorilla" exhibition. This article was written after the fire that destroyed the second museum. I can't ...

Maybe you've seen Richard Florida's Atantic article on meltdown geography, or the New York Times on LA's beleaguered hipster suburb . Both effectively say suburbs will eat it in this recession. Why? Because as heavily dependent as Gotham is on the smoldering financial services industry, it's actuall...

The second-oldest human footprints ever found show that mankind's ancestors walked out of Africa on feet indistinguishable from our own. The 1.5 million-year-old footprints, found in sediment deposits in northern Kenya, are the oldest identified since Mary Leakey found 3.75 million-year-old tracks p...

newVideoPlayer("/maher_bankers_gawker.flv", 506, 423,""); Don't get us wrong: We despise the arrogant and overpaid financiers responsible for this economic mess. They, not taxpayers, should pay for their incompetence. But banker hatred is starting to get worrisomely extreme. Some examples: Bill Mahe...

If you've ever wondered why humans don't have long, prehensile toes that would turn our feet into extra hands, here's an answer: stubby toes may be custom-made for running. Biomechanical analysis shows that long toes require more energy and generate more shock than short toes, making them one of man...

A review of the new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion , by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending from the Wall Street Journal. It's nonsense that human beings have not changed at all in the last 40,000-50,000 years, as Stephen J Gould had said. Maybe the changes are not obvious, but the evolution of th...

Have you always thought that rich people are jerks? Perhaps that's because of the fact that science has just proved: Rich people are jerks. [Psychology researchers at Berkeley] videotaped 100 undergraduate students who didn't know each other, and studied their body language during one-minute gaps in...

Here’s an oddity I started thinking about following a tweet by Dr Kiki who pointed to this article Return of the Neanderthals: If we can resurrect them through fossil DNA, should we?. The strange thing was my reaction to this. The answer seems obvious. I thought I’d missed the boat on th...

CHICAGO — Raw-food devotees take note: Your diet is not in any way natural. Humans are as adapted to cooking our food as cows are to eating grass, or ticks are to sucking blood. "Cooking is a human universal," said Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham at the American Association for th...

Want to fire a servant over some trifle? Delay a wedding? Flake out on your friends or children? No problem: Just blame the national economic collapse. It works even if you're rich. We know because a variety of self-professed weasels shared their stories with the New York Times. The Sunday Styles st...