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Charles Darwin wasted no time applying his theory of evolution to human psychology, following On the Origin of Species (1859) with The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Ever since, the issue hasn’t been whether evolutionary theory can illuminate the study of psychology but how it will do so. Still, a concerted effort to explain how evolution has affected human behavior began only in the 1970s with the emergence of sociobiology....

Antidepressants restore well-being to many people, but sometimes at the cost of such side effects as weight gain or loss of interest in sex. And these side effects can be just part of the frustration. As Robin Marantz Henig wrote in “Lifting the Black Cloud,” in the March issue of Scientific American, the drugs that have long dominated the market—the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and the serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs)—“do not help everyone and eventually fail in more than a third of users....

What is flavor? Beginning with this simple question, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist John McQuaid weaves a fascinating story with a beginning some half a billion years ago. In his new book, Tasty, McQuaid argues that the sense of taste has played a central role in the evolution of humans. McQuaid’s tale is about science, but also about culture, history and, one senses, our future. He answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook....

Advice about moving on and letting go often gets metaphorical, even existential. But I’m a pragmatist and as they say, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Today we’ll focus on those first steps. Here are five in-the-moment, concrete tips for when you suddenly realize your gaze is focused squarely on your navel. Tip #1: Make a decision to move on. Realizing you get to choosewhether or not to dwell is empowering....

Editors’ note: The MIDAS Network simulations of pandemic influenza described in this article are ongoing. Results expected to be released in February 2005 have been delayed and are now expected to be made public by the MIDAS investigators later this spring. Suppose terrorists were to release plague in Chicago, and health officials, faced with limited resources and personnel, had to quickly choose the most effective response. Would mass administration of antibiotics be the best way to halt an outbreak?...

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Evolutionary interests of males and females do not always coincide. This is known as sexual conflict: male innovations that allow them to reproduce more sometimes hurt females, and vice versa. Male fruit flies, for instance, inject their partners with toxic chemicals during sex. These toxins destroy sperm of the female’s previous mates, improving his own chances for becoming the sole father of her offspring....

From Nature magazine In an effort to overcome China’s near-monopoly on the supply of rare-earth elements, Japan and Vietnam have launched a joint research centre in Hanoi to improve extraction and processing of the materials. Rare-earth elements include scandium, yttrium and the 15 lanthanides found towards the bottom of the periodic table. Their unique optical and magnetic properties are used in various high-tech applications, such as motors, catalysts, light-emitting diodes and batteries....

CREATIVE SPARKS I enjoyed reading “The Eureka Moment,” by Guenther Knoblich and Michael Oellinger. The authors give a puzzle (“Puzzle Two”) with the objective of having readers calculate the combined area of a square and a parallelogram. The solution given (that is, treating the figure as two overlapping triangles) is creative. But I am not certain of its advantage over standard geometric computation. We are told that the figures are a parallelogram and a square....

Compared with other mammals, primates—from lemurs to humans—have huge brains. But scientists still don’t know exactly why—or even when—our brains ballooned. A new study, published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, postulates that even without big brains, early primates were able to do a lot of primatelike things—a finding that calls into question many of the prevailing evolutionary theories. “At the beginning, we didn’t have an exceptionally large brain,” says Jonathan Bloch, an associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History and co-author of the paper, talking about primates in general....

The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren. Random House, 2007 Jeff Warren spent several summers planting trees in northern Ontario, during which he frequently experienced something very odd. He would grab his shovel and start digging at 9 A.M., but when he would raise his head the sun would have moved to the other side of the sky and his watch would show 2 P.M.—and he would have no memory of the past five hours....

The oceans have heaved up and down as world temperatures have waxed and waned, but as new research tracking the past 2,800 years shows, never during that time did the seas rise as sharply or as suddenly as has been the case during the last century. The new study, the culmination of a decade of work by three teams of farflung scientists, has charted what they called an “acceleration” in sea level rise that’s triggering and worsening flooding in coastlines around the world....

After watching the movie Jaws, I had a deep sense of dread about going into the water—even if the water was in a swimming pool. A similar hydrophobia came over me while reading the riveting new book Resurrecting the Shark, by Bozeman, Mont.–based writer Susan Ewing. And this anxiety was even less rational than any arising from a Jaws viewing, as the book’s subtitle makes clear: A Scientific Obsession and the Mavericks Who Solved the Mystery of a 270-Million-Year-Old Fossil....

Much of the controversy surrounding research on stem cells hinges on the source of the cells–particularly whether they come from embryonic sources or adult ones. Now research published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides new insight into the abilities of stem cells taken from hair follicles. The results indicate that these adult stem cells can develop into neurons. Inside a hair follicle is a small bulge that houses stem cells....

By Ros Krasny WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Friday approved the first genetically modified potato for commercial planting in the United States, a move likely to draw the ire of groups opposed to artificial manipulation of foods. The so-called Innate potato, developed by the J.R. Simplot Company, is engineered to contain less of a suspected human carcinogen that occurs when a conventional potato is fried, and is also less prone to bruising during transport....

By Diego Ore CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela said on Tuesday it would start crushing abandoned cars and bicycles to provide raw materials for housing construction and supplement drastically reduced amounts of local steel. “We have sent 10,485 automobiles, 9,651 motorbikes and 539 bicycles to the national steel industry,” Maria Martinez, a deputy justice minister, said during a visit to an abandoned car deposit outside Caracas. That quantity of steel, she said, could be used for rebars, which reinforce concrete, in the construction of tens of thousands of housing units....

Nine years ago the Food and Drug Administration approved tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) as the first, and still only, drug for treating ischemic strokes, which are caused by blood clots in the brain that starve neurons of oxygen. Yet only 3 percent of stroke victims receive this clot-busting thrombolytic, largely because they enter the emergency room within three hours of the onset of symptoms. After that, tPA’s effectiveness in reducing death and disability sinks, while the relative risk of dangerous hemorrhaging rises....

Greenland’s snowy surface is now darker in the spring than it was before 2009, suggesting that the ice sheet’s melting and contribution to sea-level rise may be larger than expected, according to a new study. The research in Nature Geoscience this week adds to a body of recent research finding that the Arctic’s albedo, or reflectiveness, may decline more sharply than original estimates. When snow is darker, it absorbs more solar energy and melts more easily....

DEL MAR, Calif.—Kim and Marilyn Fletcher stood on the deck of their beachfront home watching waves crash onto the shore. They savored the view from behind a 22-foot-high sea wall, a common sight along this eroding stretch of coast. The sandy beach in front of homes in this north San Diego County town is shrinking, and the high tide is edging closer. Kim Fletcher, 89, witnessed the transformation. His maternal grandfather bought more than 10 acres of beachfront property in 1946....

Late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel put the public spotlight on a rare congenital heart condition Monday with an emotional retelling of the drama surrounding the recent birth of his son, Billy. Just hours after Kimmel’s wife Molly gave birth, doctors diagnosed Billy with a combination of heart defects known as tetralogy of Fallot with pulmonary atresia, a condition that occurs in one out of every 2,000 babies. The defects affect the heart’s structure, allowing low-oxygen blood to flow from the heart to the rest of the body....

When science is taught in school, it’s usually presented as a logical sequence of hypotheses and experimentation. One delightful surprise when you start learning more about the process of science is that it’s unpredictable, messy and weird. Some scientists prefer to highlight ways their research worked as expected—but it’s a much better story when a scientist tells you everything that was spectacularly strange. Neurobiologist Kenneth C. Catania explains how a parasitic wasp turns its cockroach prey into a zombie, how the cockroach tries to protect itself from the precision attack, and how the process of studying this conflict became more improvisational and goofy with every discovery....