Katherine Ellen Foley

You probably have more in common with the howler monkey facing you from behind the glass than you previously thought.

Although sparsely populated by people, Greenland is home to some really old life. The sharks that patrol the country’s coast are the oldest living vertebrates on the planet. And the ice-covered island hosts the remains of some of Earth’s most ancient bacteria—maybe the oldest evidence of life we’ve found on the planet so far.

Cancer is something we humans can’t catch from one another. Some animals, though, aren’t so lucky. Tasmanian devils, along with dogs and shellfish, are all capable of spreading different types of cancer to one another.

Your dog knows when you really mean he’s a good boy—and when you’re giving him empty praise.

Lucy was a tiny—just three and a half feet tall and about 60 pounds. When she lived 3.2 million years ago in Ethiopia, she likely spent her days foraging for food and her nights sleeping in trees to avoid predators.

Like many of us, Australian Shanti Korporaal fell in love with “Star Wars” as a kid and dreamed of one day being a Jedi. But unlike most of us, at 27 she’s made at least part of that dream a reality.

For the 3.6 million people in the US with severe allergies to food or bee-stings, having a prescription EpiPen on hand can be a matter of life or death.

From choosing coffee or tea to caffeinate yourself in the morning to how you plan to unwind after the day’s end, we make decisions of varying degrees of importance every day.

These days, most heterosexual couples in the US divvy up the financial responsibility in their marriages; only about 20% of women stay at home while their husbands work. And this could be good news for the overall health and well-being of married men in the country.

I’m not saying that I show up to dates sweaty, but I have been known to wash my face, change my clothes, and douse myself in liberal amounts of deodorant and Febreze in lieu of showering so I can squeeze a run into my day.

Opioid painkillers—including drugs like fentanyl, morphine and oxycontin—are highly addictive and can lead to fatal overdoses. In the United States, opioid drug abuse has been steadily on the rise, killing close to 19,000 in 2014 (pdf) and claiming the life of the pop-star Prince earlier this year.

As great as it feels to bury your jacket in the back of the closet, break out the shorts, and plan weekend trips to the beach, there’s always a point in the deep summer where the heat starts to feel like too much.

Even though millennials have been described as deep steeped in hookup culture, they may actually be having less sex than previous generations.

From an outside perspective, death may seem like the worst possible outcome for patients who are sick. Those actually suffering from terminal illnesses, however, see things a little differently.

Today (July 29), the Florida Department of Health (DOH) confirmed the first four locally-transmitted cases of the Zika virus in the continental US. The DOH also stated that the virus was probably spread by mosquitos.

Among different crowds, hypnosis can have a reputation ranging from goofy and gimmicky to outright spooky. But regardless of what you think, neuroscience is now showing it has a noticeable effect on the brain.

One potential answer to the growing problem of antibiotic resistant infections may have been right under our noses all along—or rather, in them.

ABC’s long-running hit series The Bachelor is often criticized for perpetuating an unrealistic and outdated idea of a fairy-tale romance. As a dedicated viewer, I can say these criticisms are absolutely true.

A unique case of Zika in the state of Utah has raised an alarm in the scientific community. A man contracted the virus through contact with his elderly father, who had 100,000 times as many viruses in his blood as a normal infected person. The father died—the first Zika-related death in the US—but the son recovered. Yet we still don’t know how the son contracted the virus in the first place.

When seeking a romantic partner, we usually look for someone with certain traits: attractiveness, intelligence, sense of humor. Perhaps, though, we should also consider whether they like to drink—or, more to the point, whether their drinking habits match our own.

There’s the world we would like to live in and then there’s the world we’ve got. For very few people, especially in 2016, do those two intersect.

Crows may be the homicide detectives of the avian world.

Every now and then, an article circulates on social media promising something too good to be true. Have you heard that wine before bed can be used as a weight loss tool?

It’s pretty great to hop on the scale in the morning to find that you’ve dropped weight from the night before. But don’t be disappointed if you weigh yourself again later in the day and find you’ve gained those same few pounds back.