People born with an insensitivity to pain could help researchers understand how pain works and one day develop new painkillers with fewer side effects.
The fossil called Little Foot, which had tantalized scientists with its human- and apelike features, is a million years younger than had been thought, a new study says.
Mel Gibson's movie puts a fictional face on the collapse of the Maya Empire. Now see what the civilization really looked like, according to National Geographic artists and ancient murals.
The emergence of "female labor roles" played an important role in evolutionary history, a new study says, and might have helped modern humans edge out Neandertals.
Curing blindness and treating diabetes "naturally" in mice are just two of the recent breakthroughs that suggest stem cells hold real potential for helping humans.
Two new genetic analyses reveal an early split between Neandertals and modern humans, but show that the two species share 99.5 percent of the same genes.
Tons of poisonous sludge dumped in a major Ivory Coast city have led to at least ten deaths and renewed calls for tighter controls over international waste shipments.
The Asia-to-Alaska land bridge disappeared a thousand years earlier than thought, a new study says—fueling speculation that the first Americans arrived by boat.
The U.S. population will cross the 300 million mark this week, adding to what a new report calls a nation of "super-sized resource appetites" making enormous demands on the planet's resources.
People in the developed world today are taller and more robust than their great-great-grandparents ever imagined, and not just because of better medicine, a researcher says.
