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Hunters are often thought of as bad for wildlife, but scientists have recently found that Aboriginal hunters in Australia actually boosted certain lizard populations by improving the locales where the reptiles live. Scientists investigated the Western Desert of Australia, where many native species have declined or gone extinct in the past century. But paradoxically, numbers of the sand monitor lizard (Varanus gouldii) — reptiles that weigh about 1 lb. (0.45 kilograms) and feed on smaller lizards, insects and arachnids — are higher where Aboriginal hunting is most prevalent....

Next time you find yourself in a bad mood, don’t try to put on a happy face—instead tackle a project that has been stymieing you. Melancholy might just help you hit peak performance, reports Joseph Forgas, a professor of psychology at the University of New South Wales, in the journal Australasian Science. Forgas reviewed several of his studies in which researchers induced either a good or bad mood in volunteers. Each study found that people in a bad mood performed tasks better than those in a good mood....

Editor’s introduction: Scientists have proposed compelling steps to ease specific kinds of environmental damage and slow consumption of certain resources [see “Solutions to Environmental Threats,”]. But Bill McKibben, scholar in residence at Middlebury College and co-founder of climate action group 350.org, maintains that to truly stop ruining the planet, society must break its most debilitating habit: growth. In his new book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, McKibben argues that humankind, because of its actions, now lives on a fundamentally different world, which he calls “Eaarth....

Dear EarthTalk: I’ve followed the trends in “eco-homes” now for many years. Are there equally encouraging things happening in the world of condos? – Charlie Anderson, Seattle, WA Believe it or not, condominiums may be some of the most environmentally responsible housing out there today, especially since more and more developers are paying attention to sustainability from the get-go. By their very nature, many condo complexes adhere to some of the most basic tenets of green housing: density, to maximize surrounding open space and minimize buildings’ physical and operational footprints; proximity to mass transit, given their typical location in urban areas; and reduced resource use per unit, thanks to shared systems, walls and common spaces....

Have you ever been surprised at yourself after reviewing what you brought home from a shopping spree? Perhaps you bought a certain brand of chocolate only because a television ad for it showed warm tropical beaches and palm trees. Or you purchased an overpriced pastry at a bakery because it somehow reminded you of a treat from your childhood. Maybe you sprang for an electronic gadget you knew you didn’t need just because your colleagues already have it....

The chimpanzees of Ivory Coast’s Ta National Park in western Africa are quite handy with a hammer stone. They use the large stones to expertly smash panda nuts and other food sources, chipping and flaking them in the process—a feat humans would be hard-pressed to mimic. After all, the stones are much larger than can easily be grasped by a human hand and require much more strength than the human arm can generate....

The United States has recently taken some important steps to rectify past injustices to Native Americans. These include the Supreme Court upholding an 1833 treaty guaranteeing tribal sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma, and several professional sports teams getting rid of offensive names such as “Redskins.” However, in my profession—global change ecology—I believe there is a trend to downplay the importance of Indigenous people. In the U.S., Native Americans have long been regarded as ecosystem architects, taming nature and molding it in ways to sustain their needs for food and shelter....

Editor’s note (10/24/14): This story reflects Ebola transmission figures as of October 15, 2014. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa continues to rage, with the number of people infected roughly doubling every 3–4 weeks. More than 8,000 people are thought to have contracted the disease, and almost half of those have died, according to the World Health Organization. Although these estimates are already staggering, the situation on the ground means that not all cases and deaths are being reported, so the true extent is likely to be much greater....

For as long as the name Einstein is remembered, it will surely be as a conjurer of great ideas, relativity being foremost among them. But the most celebrated theoretical physicist of all time also tried his hand once at designing an experimental instrument. It didn’t amount to much, but that doesn’t make it any less fascinating to physicists, who have now reconstructed the device that Einstein called his “little machine.”...

In my Scientific American column this month I suggested that we need to retire the password as our primary security tool. Passwords clearly aren’t secure enough, and heaven knows they’re inconvenient and fussy. Iris recognition, retina scanning, fingerprints, voice recognition—all of these show promise. But there’s one security tool that’s secure, effortless and available now. It’s a special kind of face recognition that’s available on some Windows 10 computers—those equipped with an Intel RealSense camera, such as the Surface Pro 4....

A few months back, while riding the subway, some words fell out of my mouth: “No, no, don’t worry about it.” Addressing no one but myself, I blurted this phrase while mentally replaying an earlier, embarrassing conversation. Although I have occasionally muttered out loud when alone, this was the first instance in such a public space. No one seemed to care or even notice. Still, I could not help wondering whether my mind was drifting too far from the familiar realm of the functionally neurotic....

When ecologist Hjalmar Kühl first visited the Republic of Congo in 2003, deep in the forest, he met chimpanzees whose curiosity gave away that they had never seen a human before. “You’d try to move away, and they’d come closer,” he says. “They’d just sit there watching us.” Today it’s “basically impossible” to observe such behaviors at most field sites, Kühl says. The reason seems obvious to him. Unlike 20 years ago, Kühl now rarely finds himself far from a village, road, oil pipeline, logging area or mine....

In the pitch-black darkness, sitting on the forest floor with our bodies so close that we touch, we sing, each voice producing a different yodeled melody to create a densely overlapping harmony. As the hours pass, individual melodies melt into one another, and we begin to lose ourselves in the human and acoustic tapestry we have created. The intensity of the singing builds, its coordination increasingly perfected until the music is so beautiful that the self melts away....

By Declan ButlerMajor science publishers are gearing up to fight plagiarism. The publishers, including Elsevier and Springer, are set to roll out software across their journals that will scan submitted papers for identical or paraphrased chunks of text that appear in previously published articles. The move follows pilot tests of the software that have confirmed high levels of plagiarism in articles submitted to some journals, according to an informal survey by Nature of nine science publishers....

Starting in the spring of 2018, experts around the world puzzled over strange seismic waves that no one actually felt but that were recorded globally by seismometers. Volcanic activity on the seafloor off the French island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean was quickly suspected because such strings of seismic events, or “swarm quakes,” occur regularly when volcanoes stir. In fact, the tremors could ultimately be traced back to the eruption of a huge magma chamber in the region....

Patricia Straat served as co-experimenter on one of the most controversial experiments ever sent to Mars: the Labeled Release instrument on the Viking Mars landers. The experiment’s principal investigator, Gilbert Levin, insists to this day that the project found extraterrestrial life. Most scientists doubt this interpretation, but the issue has never been fully settled. When Viking 1 and 2 touched down on Mars in 1976, each carried several instruments to study the planet and look for signs of life....

Not long ago I signed up for an improvisational theater class. I thought I might gain stage presence and confidence; little did I know I would encounter a genuine cognitive challenge. Within seconds of stepping into a new scene, you must assign yourself a character, convey a location and jump into an activity. You must also react convincingly to your scene partner’s responses. Spinning a believable narrative out of two actors’ choices is like keeping a beach ball aloft no matter what awkward trajectory it may have spun off on....

By Geoff BrumfielThe end of the world is not nigh after all. Flouting predictions from some theorists, microscopic black holes have so far failed to appear inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scientists there have revealed.The result, which will be posted this week on arXiv.org, comes as researchers make plans to keep the LHC running until the end of 2012, rather than 2011 as previously scheduled. The 27-kilometre collider at the particle-physics laboratory CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, had endured delays and a crippling breakdown before finally surging to life late in 2009, and physicists say it is now performing above expectations....

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine—Imagine a metal arch taller than the Statue of Liberty. Now picture it sliding a distance of roughly three football fields, making it the largest movable structure ever . Under this steel rainbow engineers are planning to entomb the site of the worst nuclear accident in history, the destroyed reactor at the Chernobyl power plant, using robotic cranes to dismantle the ruins and keep its deadly remains from poisoning the rest of the planet....

Extreme temperatures are setting heat records around the world almost every year. And it will become more and more common, scientists say. A study in Nature Climate Change yesterday finds that about 60% of the world will experience monthly temperature records every year by the end of the century if global greenhouse gas emissions don’t decline. That’s a milestone never before recorded by humans. Developing countries and small island nations are expected to be the hardest hit....