Once upon a time, it was important that farmers - the first agricultural scientists - create seeds that were larger, more nutritious, and more resilient to environmental stress. Nature might bring rain, it might not, pests were going to eat their way through whole fields if they could. 

As agriculture improved, civilization followed. Seeds such as wheat, rice and corn directly provide about 70% of the calories eaten by people every day. What isn't directly eaten is still contributing, either by providing feed for livestock or by being grown into fruits and vegetables. 

'The right thing, the wrong thing, do it with authority is a common' is a common statement for leadership behavior.

Humans take comfort in confidence. Even in things like facts; the faster the answer the more likely others will believe it. 

In the age of the dinosaurs, you could have walked from one pole to another. At that time, the continents were all joined together, forming the supercontinent Pangea. 

Yet they didn't.Though sauropodomorph dinosaurs first appeared in Argentina and Brazil about 230 million years ago, it took them 15,000,000 years to migrate to the northern hemisphere.

A new study has identified nine new regions that influence facial features such as nose, lip, jaw, and brow shape

The analysis of genetic data from more than 6,000 volunteers across Latin America was designed to find genes that determine the shape of a person's facial profile but also learned that one of the genes appears to have been inherited from the Denisovans, an extinct group of ancient humans who lived tens of thousands of years ago.

Most dog owners will say that dogs understand tone, and interpret that rather than words, and that most dogs do not learn words (i.e. names of objects), unless extensively trained, but a new analysis shows that is not always the case.

Some dogs have some exceptional abilities and can learn new words after hearing them only four times. A new study by the Family Dog Project is just what it sounds like; investigating dogs who seem to learn words in the absence of any formal training by simply being exposed to playing with their owners in the typical way owners do, in a human family.

The Arsinoite nome (now called Faiyum) region 60 miles south-west of Cairo was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire but by the end of the third century most settlements there had been abandoned.

The problem was climate change. Attempts by local farmers to adapt to the new dryness and desertification of the farmland didn't work and they had to move.

Nature gave the area a one-two punch. Climate data indicates that the monsoon rains at the headwaters of the Nile in the Ethiopian Highlands suddenly and permanently weakened, which meant lower high-water levels of the entire river in summer, while a tropical volcanic eruption in 266, which in the following year brought a below-average flood of the Nile, also played a role.