One morning 10 years ago, psychologist Jaak Panksepp walked into his lab and made an unusual proposition to a research assistant: “Come tickle some rats with me!” Panksepp wasn’t just trying to ...

If you think laughter and comedy are reserved strictly for humans, you’d be wrong. A study in the late 1990s showed that ...

Tickling, a seemingly involuntary reflex, evolved not for humor but for connection. It targets exposed areas, triggering laughter when the touch is recognized as safe, signaling non-danger and ...

How do whales hear music? They listen to orca-stras! I told that joke to a lizard and got crickets. It made me wonder the same thing as Eid Muhammad Afridi, who asked Saturday's Weird Animal Question ...

Just when you thought the news couldn’t get more bizarre, now this: A new study reveals rats are ticklish. That’s not all. Not only are they ticklish, they laugh when tickled. You read that right. A ...

A laugh may signal mockery, humor, joy or simply be a response to tickling, but each kind of laughter conveys a wealth of auditory and social information. These different kinds of laughter also spark ...

Laughter’s evolutionary story may be written on chimpanzees’ faces. Chimps at play make open-mouth facial expressions while either laughing out loud or staying silent, say psychologist Marina ...

Adapted from Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? … And Other Reflections on Being Human, by Jesse Bering, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (North America), ...