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What credo would you choose: “Share and share alike?” or “To each his own”? The choice doesn’t relate only to material goods or socialism versus capitalism. It can also reflect attitudes about how we solve our collective problems, such as affordable access to health care or threats from climate change. Despite the existence of shared resources in our lives—water, air, land, tax dollars—some people will lean into a go-it-alone approach, with each individual deciding for themselves what’s best....

Not long ago earthquakes in Oklahoma were rare. Not anymore. Twenty earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or greater shook Oklahoma in 2009. The state has seen a 40-fold increase in seismicity since 2008. The cause? Humans, according to new research in Science. The study confirmed what geologists have been speculating for years: that underground water disposal by oil and gas companies causes earthquakes. Millions of gallons of wastewater are produced every month in Oklahoma as a result of extracting oil and natural gas from the ground....

But these global voices are being silenced at a frightening rate. The key indicator of this decline in cultural diversity is language loss. A language, of course, is not merely a set of grammatical rules or a vocabulary. It is the vehicle by which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Each one is an old-growth forest of the mind. Linguists agree, however, that 50 percent of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered....

Originally posted on the Nature news blog Canadian archaeologists have found one of the Franklin Expedition’s ships — lost since the Arctic explorers famously disappeared in 1846 — off of King William Island in the Canadian Arctic. The ship is either the HMS Erebus or the HMS Terror, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced on September 9. The discovery comes in the sixth year of expeditions led by Parks Canada, which has scoured hundreds of square kilometres of ocean bottom in search of the Franklin ships....

In the search for habitable worlds beyond our solar system, the biggest, hottest opportunities may be found around the smallest, coolest stars. Called M dwarfs, these stars have a mere fraction of the sun’s mass and luminosity but are more than 10 times as numerous. Planets circling an M dwarf must be in a close orbit to the star to be warm enough for life, like campers huddling around a small fire....

NASA’s Kepler mission has been a smash hit. It has discovered thousands of probable exoplanets—worlds orbiting stars other than the sun—more than 100 of which have already been vetted and confirmed. Many of those planets are among the smallest, most Earth-size planets known: of the 25 smallest-diameter exoplanets discovered to date, all but one were spotted by Kepler. There is just one asterisk tacked to Kepler’s immensely productive haul: the planets are hundreds or even thousands of light-years away, often too distant to investigate in any detail....

Despite mass vaccinations of poultry in China, the bird flu virus continues to evolve. Samples collected from poultry markets in southern China over the last year show that a variant of the virus has spread outward from a single province and supplanted strains in the rest of the region, researchers report. The result calls into question the steps taken so far to contain the virus, which public health officials fear could give rise to a deadly worldwide flu pandemic....

When Russia launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, the whole world was watching. But another, much smaller audience was watching, too: the seven crew members onboard the International Space Station (ISS), orbiting hundreds of kilometers above the chaos below. Across more than two decades of continuous operations, the ISS has been a steady beacon of hope for peaceful international collaboration. The massive space habitat is the product of a remarkable partnership among five space agencies (including NASA and Russia’s national space agency Roscosmos) representing 15 participating countries....

Shining just 12 light-years from Earth, the star Tau Ceti so resembles the sun that it has appeared in numerous science-fiction stories and was the first star astronomers ever searched for signs of intelligent life, half a century ago. In 2012 Tau Ceti grew still more intriguing when astronomers reported five possible planets somewhat larger than Earth circling closer to the star than Mars orbits the sun—one of which is in the star’s habitable zone....

Late on the evening of June 14, 2012, groups of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers working on the Large Hadron Collider began peering into a just opened data cache. This huge machine at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics near Geneva, had been producing tremendous amounts of data in the months since it awoke from its winter-long slumber. But the more than 6,000 physicists who work on the LHC’s two largest experiments were wary of unintentionally adding biases to their analysis....

A team of scientists at Stanford University has publicly released its whole-cell model of the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium, along with full data sets from more than 3,000 simulations of the single-celled microbe growing and dividing. The video below plays back data from one of those simulations through a visualization tool called WholeCellViz, which is also available online. Six panels display different aspects of the cell’s physiology as it proceeds through its nine-hour life cycle....

JANUARY 1957 BOREDOM–“In this age of semi-automation, when not only military personnel but also many industrial workers have little to do but keep a constant watch on instruments, the problem of human behavior in monotonous situations is becoming acute. In 1951 McGill University psychologist Donald O. Hebb obtained a grant from the Defense Research Board of Canada to make a systematic study. Prolonged exposure to a monotonous environment has definitely deleterious effects....

In the late 1970s the fbi hired sue thomas, along with eight other deaf individuals, to analyze fingerprint patterns. Deaf people, the agency reasoned, might have an easier time staying focused during the notoriously meticulous task. From the first day, however, Thomas found the job unbearably monotonous. She complained to her superiors so often that she was prepared to walk away unemployed when her boss summoned her to a meeting with other agents in his office....

Do you have what it takes to resist temptation? Or do you find yourself indulging too often in a decadent dessert, using company time to check Facebook, or foregoing morning exercise in favor of sleep? We do not need a science experiment to understand the universality of cravings, desires and longings, or to understand how human desire serves as a double-edged sword. Urges motivate us in positive and important ways - to seek food, find shelter, make friends, get sleep, procreate....

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Now that we’ve learned how to draw Pascal’s famous triangle and use the numbers in its rows to easily calculate probabilities when tossing coins, it’s time to dig a bit deeper and investigate the properties of the triangle itself. Why is that an interesting thing to do? Because it turns out that Pascal’s triangle is not a one trick pony—it’s useful for a surprising number of things....

It’s that time of year again – when our noses start to drain, our throats feel like we swallowed a golf ball, and our muscles feel like we aged 30 years. Yes, it’s flu season. And not only have I already seen a few patients trickle through with the seasonal flu, but I am also suffering from one right now as I sit down to write and record this episode (cough, cough)....

Movies and television shows are full of scenes where a man tries unsuccessfully to interact with a pretty woman. In many cases, the potential suitor ends up acting foolishly despite his best attempts to impress. It seems like his brain isn’t working quite properly and according to new findings, it may not be. Researchers have begun to explore the cognitive impairment that men experience before and after interacting with women. A 2009 study demonstrated that after a short interaction with an attractive woman, men experienced a decline in mental performance....

By Sharon Levy of Nature magazineDuring the Ice Age, Earth’s northern reaches were covered by chilly, arid grasslands roamed by mammoths, woolly rhinoceros and long-horned bison. That ecosystem, known by palaeontologists as the mammoth steppe, vanished about 13,000 years ago. It has no modern counterpart.Yet one of its plants has reportedly been resurrected by a team of scientists who tapped a treasure trove of fruits and seeds, buried some 30,000 years ago by ground squirrels and preserved in the permafrost (S....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The English Civil Wars (1642-1651) were caused by a monumental clash of ideas between King Charles I of England (r. 1625-1649) and his parliament. Arguments over the powers of the monarchy, finances, questions of religious practices and toleration, and the clash of leaders with personalities, who passionately believed in their own cause but had little empathy towards any other view, all contributed to the decade-long conflict which saw over 600 battles and sieges, thousands of deaths, the execution of Charles, abolition of the monarchy, and the proclamation of England as a republic....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The clothing of the ancient Etruscans, a civilization which flourished in central Italy between the 8th and 3rd century BCE, can be seen in many media of their art including wall paintings, bronze sculpture, stone relief carvings, and painted figures on terracotta funerary urns, as well as occasional descriptions by ancient foreign writers....