Stories on humanity’s brush with annihilation 74,000 years ago and how animals avoid gross things for their own safety.

Stories on animals that didn't need human help to become tame; false news spreads deeper, wider, and faster than true news-with or without bots; and listening for gender and sexual orientation in human speech

Stories on hints of dark matter at the dawn of the cosmos, what giant family trees can tell us about human behavior, and how people think they would react to alien microbes

Live news stories from the AAAS Annual Meeting, new dates on cave paintings reveal a Neandertal’s hand, and a review of a geologist’s book on wild times in Iceland

Stories on what we can learn from gene activity after death, and whether the sugar industry really influenced U.S. nutrition policy

Stories on how making lab animals happy may make them better experimental models, and the chemistry that’s happening in the air and on surfaces in our homes

Stories on a comprehensive study of all the babies born in 1 year at small New Zealand hospital, and how naked mole rats break a biological aging law

Stories on how the planet would react to the collapse of a humanmade solar shield, and the influence of our parents’ genes on us—even when we don’t inherit them

Podcast: The mysterious history of the Fields Medal, and using computers to predict crime

Stories on seagrass-consuming bonnethead sharks, tracing whale routes through their barnacles, and which domains of science might benefit from quantum computing