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QUESTIONS OF LOGIC Throughout the special issue on evolution, a question based on a false premise is asked: What makes human special? As a minor branch on a vast evolutionary bush, modern humans have been roaming the earth for no more than a few hundreds of thousands of years—too little time to demonstrate if the evolution of large brains is a successful strategy for long-term survival of the species. If any life-form were special, it would be bacteria, which will be here long after the human experiment is a distant memory....

Smokers tend to resist antismoking efforts that rely on “rational” approaches such as taxes, and researchers have pointed to confounding influences, including social factors and addiction. But differences in smokers’ decision-making processes may also be at play. A recent study from the Baylor College of Medicine found that smokers and nonsmokers react differently to news of how much they could have made in a stock-market game. The feedback was purely incidental: it offered no financial incentive to adjust one’s investment strategy, yet nonsmokers were swayed by what might have been and changed their tactics....

Federal disaster mitigation spending provides substantial returns for at-risk states and communities, in some cases nearly $7 in avoided disaster costs for every $1 spent before a flood, fire, windstorm or earthquake strikes. But the value of mitigation spending is not even across all states, nor is it consistent across disaster type, according to a new Pew Charitable Trusts analysis of data collected by the National Institute of Building Sciences. In fact, some of the greatest returns associated with disaster mitigation are in the Great Plains, Midwest and Ohio Valley, while coastal states like Florida, Texas and California see lower benefit-cost ratios on average, according to Pew....

By Marie-Louise Gumuchian and Anthony DeutschLONDON/AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Hurricane strength winds battered northern Europe on Monday, killing more than a dozen people, cutting power and forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights and train journeys.At least seven people died in Germany while there were four deaths in Britain and fatalities in the Netherlands, Denmark and France as the storm brought down trees, blew roofs off houses and turned over trucks, causing chaos across much of the region....

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” Oscar Wilde wrote. Ever since an early human sat by the glowing embers of a fire on a winter night, as others fell asleep and the camp quietened, we have pondered the mysteries of existence. What are those points of light studding the sky? What are these movements within my belly? Where did this life come from?...

By Nicola Jones Results are pouring in from an ambitious project that has wired the floor of the northeast Pacific Ocean with an array of cameras, seismometers, chemical sensors and more. The challenge won’t be getting good data, but rather handling the vast quantities of it, project scientists reported last week at their first post-launch meeting in Victoria, Canada. The $145-million project, called NEPTUNE Canada (North-East Pacific Time-Series Undersea Networked Experiments), has laid 800 kilometers of cable to transmit power and data, and established five “nodes” that act like giant, 13-tonne plug-in points for scientific instrumentation, lying up to 2....

I met my husband, Peter, rather randomly, at all-the-Absolut-you-could-drink benefit for the Museum of Contemporary Art. We have often observed that had we not met that night, there is no particular reason to think we would have ever chanced on each other in the future, as we did not inhabit the same professional or social spheres. From time to time, I contemplate the fantastic possibility that had one of us ventured several footsteps to the right or the left that evening, my husband, my children and my home might be subtracted from the life I lead today....

(Credit: Facebook) In the Interesting Timing Dept., WhatsApp – the messaging app acquired this week by Facebook for the eye-popping sum of $19 billion – is in the midst of an outage, after also reportedly experiencing a short run of downtime Friday night. The service became unavailable to a large number of users starting at about 11 a.m. PT Saturday, after a 20-minute outage Friday night, BNO News reported. And WhatsApp’s “WhatsApp Status” Twitter feed confirmed the outage: sorry we currently experiencing server issues....

If there is one sound that bettered our ancestors’ chances of survival, it might be the scream. When a baby needs food, it hollers; if a ravenous lion prowls a little too close, a blood-curdling shriek alerts the tribe. Yet from an acoustic standpoint, screams—and how our brain processes the sound—have been largely overlooked by researchers, until now. A study published in July in Current Biology found that screams are sonically unique in a way that perfectly captures our attention....

For the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2014 was a bad year. After a series of errors in which some agency employees were potentially exposed to anthrax and others accidentally shipped a dangerous strain of influenza virus to another lab, director Tom Frieden imposed reforms to improve safety practices. Nevertheless, the CDC, which is based in Atlanta, Georgia, reported last December that some of its lab workers had potentially been exposed to the Ebola virus....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The widespread use of paper and printing were features of ancient China which distinguished it from other ancient cultures. Traditionally, paper was invented in the early 2nd century CE, but there is evidence it was much earlier. As a cheaper and more convenient material than bamboo, wood, or silk, paper helped spread literature and literacy but it was used for many other purposes from hats to packaging....

It’s official: When the sea ice that blankets the Arctic Ocean hit its yearly peak on Feb. 25, the maximum area was a record low. Warm temperatures in parts of the polar regions kept sea ice levels depressed, and also contributed to the winter peak occurring much earlier than usual, the National Snow & Ice Data Center announced Thursday. The maximum normally isn’t reached until early March, but was recorded about a week early this year, the NSIDC said....

Children with autism make less eye contact than others of the same age, an indicator that is used to diagnose the developmental disorder after the age of two years. But a paper published today in Nature reports that infants as young as two months can display signs of this condition, the earliest detection of autism symptoms yet. If the small study can be replicated in a larger population, it might provide a way of diagnosing autism in infants so that therapies can begin early, says Warren Jones, research director at the Marcus Autism Center in Atlanta, Georgia....

Across the planet, shorebirds are in serious trouble. In the past 50 years their well-documented North American populations are estimated to have plummeted by at least 70 percent on average, and shorebirds elsewhere are hardly doing better, if not worse. Reasons are many—the shorelines and mudflats where the birds feed are polluted or disappearing, and many of the migrants among them struggle to find food and resting places in areas where they used to....

What stops a few popular Web sites from dominating the global exchange of ideas on the Internet? Human curiosity powered by search engines, researchers say. Visitors view and link to a few Web sites such as Yahoo, eBay and MySpace often, whereas most sites are hardly noticed. Some experts worry that search engines such as Google exaggerate this trend, because they rank search results partly by how popular a Web site already is....

Editor’s Note: This article is the first of a two-part Q&A from a roundtable in which James Cameron discussed deep-ocean science with researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod, Mass. In March filmmaker and aquanaut James Cameron, back from his record-setting visit to the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench 11 kilometers below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, announced the donation of his sub, DEEPSEA CHALLENGER, to Woods Hole, where scientists plan to use its cutting-edge technology to help further their understanding of life in ocean trenches....

The oldest-known stick insect to mimic a plant has been unearthed in China. The newly discovered species — an extinct, distant relative of living stick insects — dates to the early Cretaceous Period, roughly 126 million years ago. The buggy impostor likely used its leaflike appearance to hide from tree-climbing predators that dined on insects, said study co-author Olivier Béthoux, a paleontologist at the Center of Paleobiodiversity and Paleoenvironment Research (CR2P) at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris....

Editor’s Note (5/25/22): This article is being republished in the wake of a school shooting in Uvalde, Tex., that killed at least 19 children and two teachers. It was the deadliest such attack since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, and occurred less than two weeks after a deadly shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., that killed 10 Black people in an act of domestic terrorism. After the massacre this week in Sutherland Springs, Texas, that state’s attorney general told Fox News gun control laws will not prevent mass shootings....

Dear EarthTalk: Can you explain the 2010 Safe Cosmetics Act? What does it purport to do and has it been signed into law?—Megan Wilson, Austin, Texas The Safe Cosmetics Act was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in July 2010 by Democrats Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin. But it never got past committee reviews and thus never came up for a vote....

Have you ever been at a restaurant table where everyone ordered a salad? A new finding may explain why this happens: When we order in groups, we like to be similar to our friends, even if it means ordering something we would not typically pick on our own. Researchers analyzed receipts from 1,459 people who ate in groups at an Oklahoma restaurant over a 19-week period. There were 51 items on the menu to choose from, which fit into eight food categories (soups/salads, burgers/sandwiches, combo meals, pasta, vegetarian dishes, choice steaks, prime steaks, and the daily specials)....