Daily Interlude

Fair play: Monkeys share our sense of injustice

How often have you seen rich people take to the streets, shouting that they're earning too much? No, I thought not. Protesters are typically blue-collar workers yelling that the minimum wage has to go up ... more >>

Physics and Pixie Dust

For many years, historians of the Renaissance have lauded the value of forgeries and fakes. Counterfeit documents, passed off as real, offer invaluable clues about the wider culture in which they were made ... more >>

Genome 10K: A New Ark

Scientists have an ambitious new strategy for untangling the evolutionary history of humans and their biological relatives: Create a genetic menagerie made of the DNA of more than 10,000 vertebrate species. The plan, proposed by an international consortium of scientists, is to obtain, preserve, and sequence the DNA of approximately one species for each genus of living mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. ... more >>

A New Wrinkle in Ancient Ocean Chemistry

Scientists widely accept that the Earth's atmosphere underwent a dramatic rise in oxygen 2.4 billion years ago, which ultimately paved the way for complex life on our planet. New research has helped solve some important questions surrounding this 'Great Oxidation Event' ... more >>

Coffee Brims With Health Benefits, Researchers Say

Although caffeine might be considered the "active ingredient" in coffee, coffee is only two percent caffeine and 98 percent "other stuff," including more than 1,000 different compounds such as vitamins, minerals and amino acids. It even contains fiber. Each cup contains the kind that helps prevent cholesterol from being absorbed by the intestines ... more >>

Babies 'cry in mother's tongue'

German researchers say babies begin to pick up the nuances of their parents' accents while still in the womb ... more >>

Russia's Conquering Zeros

It may be no accident that, while some of the best American mathematical minds worked to solve one of the century's hardest problems—the Poincaré Conjecture—it was a Russian mathematician working in Russia who, early in this decade, finally triumphed ... more >>

The Science of Shortness

Since human growth hormone was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2003 to treat unusually short but otherwise medically normal children, a great deal of research has gone into trying to prove why a couple of extra inches are crucial for an undersize kid ... more >>

Claude Lévi-Strauss obituary

French anthropologist whose analysis of kinship and myth gave rise to structuralism as an intellectual force ... more >>

Scientists Try to Calm '2012' Hysteria

Apocalyptic predictions gets a boost from conflating movie marketing hype, Mayan mythology and bad astronomy ... more >>