Humans have a positive view of nature. But is this due to an approach we have learned while growing up, or is it something we are born with? The answer is "both," according to researchers at the ...

England’s King George III descended into mental chaos, or what at the time was called madness, in 1789. Physicians could not say whether he would recover or if a replacement should assume the throne.

Luckily, acclaimed science writer Carl Zimmer is here to unravel the tangled history of the science and pseudoscience surrounding heredity, in all its many forms. In his expansive, engrossing, and ...

It is a common belief that mental illness runs in families. While it is true that heredity plays a role, in reality, the vast majority of cases—such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and ...

In 2003, a woman named Lydia Fairchild got a DNA test as part of her qualification for welfare benefits. She was told that according to her results, she was not the mother of the three children she ...

The Elephant Man, novelist Pearl S. Buck and Phoebus, god of the sun, all find their way into science writer Carl Zimmer’s latest book. In She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, Zimmer uses famous moments in ...

Two hundred years ago, biologists did not recognize that there was such a thing as 'heredity'. By the 1830s, however, insights from medicine and agriculture had indicated that something is passed from ...