Despite much recent controversy about the theory of evolution, major changes in our understanding of evolution over the past twenty years have gone virtually unnoticed.

Evolving Evolution | The New York Review of Books

My conclusion is that markets in organs are the best available way to enable persons with defective organs to get transplants much more quickly than under the present system. I do not find the arguments against allowing the sale of organs compelling, especially when weighed against the number of lives that would be saved by the increased supply stimulated by financial incentives.

Purchase and Sale of Organs for Transplant Surgery

To help atone for their environmental sins, some SUV drivers are turning to groups on the Internet that offer pain-free ways to assuage their guilt while promoting clean energy.

It involves buying something known as a carbon offset: a relatively inexpensive way to stimulate the production of clean electricity. Just go to one of several carbon-offset Web sites, calculate the amount of carbon dioxide produced when you drive, fly or otherwise burn fossil fuels, and then buy an offset that pays for an equivalent amount of clean energy.

Gas Guzzlers Find Price of Forgivenes

It seems that the more macho a man is — at least according to his hormones — the more the sight of an attractive woman will affect his judgement.

Researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium asked men to play an ultimatum game, in which they split a certain amount of money between them. High-testosterone men drove the hardest bargain — unless they had previously viewed pictures of bikini-clad models, in which case they were more likely to accept a poorer deal.

Lingerie makes hagglers happy-go-lucky | Nature

Thirteen of the nation’s most prominent physicists have written a letter to President Bush, calling U.S. plans to reportedly use nuclear weapons against Iran “gravely irresponsible” and warning that such action would have “disastrous consequences for the security of the United States and the world.”

Prominent US Physicists Send Letter to President Bush

Nicholas Wade, science reporter for The New York Times, examines what we've learned about our human ancestors using the latest techniques in DNA analysis in his new book, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors.

The data being analyzed by researchers and detailed in Wade's book has offered clues to such developments as the emergence of language, the development of clothing and domestication of animals.

Using DNA to Plumb Human Ancestry

National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence Mike Fay is currently tracking the migration of elephants on a conservation mission in Chad. He recently spoke, very quietly, with Alex Chadwick as he watched three lions eating a young elephant they recently killed.

Tracking Elephants in Chad

Recent human deaths due to infection by highly pathogenic (H5N1) avian influenza A virus have raised the specter of a devastating pandemic like that of 1917–1918, should this avian virus evolve to become readily transmissible among humans.

We introduce and use a large-scale stochastic simulation model to investigate the spread of a pandemic strain of influenza virus through the US population of 281 million individuals for R0 (the basic reproductive number) from 1.6 to 2.4.

We model the impact that a variety of levels and combinations of influenza antiviral agents, vaccines, and modified social mobility (including school closure and travel restrictions) have on the timing and magnitude of this spread.

Our simulations demonstrate that, in a highly mobile population, restricting travel after an outbreak is detected is likely to delay slightly the time course of the outbreak without impacting the eventual number ill.

For R0 < 1.9, our model suggests that the rapid production and distribution of vaccines, even if poorly matched to circulating strains, could significantly slow disease spread and limit the number ill to < 10% of the population, particularly if children are preferentially vaccinated.

Alternatively, the aggressive deployment of several million courses of influenza antiviral agents in a targeted prophylaxis strategy may contain a nascent outbreak with low R0, provided adequate contact tracing and distribution capacities exist.

For higher R0, we predict that multiple strategies in combination (involving both social and medical interventions) will be required to achieve similar limits on illness rates.

Mitigation strategies for pandemic influenza in the US

In the next decade, single-celled animals might be some of the most important figures in high technology.

"We always overestimate the immediate impact and underestimate the long-term ones. The truly revolutionary stuff will take some time to mature."

Playing science's genetic lottery | CNET News.com

The booming science of comparative genomics is allowing researchers to investigate the origins of language in an entirely new way: by asking how the genes that underwrite human language relate to genes found in other species. And these new data provide a fresh example of the power of natural selection.

From Squeak to Syntax: Language's Incremental Evolution