A particularly mind-bending (and controversial) physics paper surfaced in the past week that should make you feel pretty special. It seems the laws of physics can change after all, and it just so happens they're uniquely suited for us right here, right now.

The father of evolution apparently played God with a tropical ecosystem 160 years ago, and the results could inform future experiments to terraform Mars, botanists say.

The BBC recounts how Charles Darwin helped build an artificial forest on Ascension Island, one of his subjects of study from his trips on the HMS Beagle. Today, the island is home to species of plants that would not naturally co-exist. Darwin and his friends put them there, and nearly two centuries later, their grand experiment is living proof that we can transform natural environments.

East Coast residents are bracing for this monster, headed their way with 125-mph winds, as a fleet of NASA satellites and airplanes monitors its evolution.

As of Wednesday morning, Hurricane Earl was a Category 3 storm, but an especially large one. Storm-force winds extend 200 miles from its eye, seen above in a photo snapped from the International Space Station.

The recent WikiLeaks exposure was a huge black eye for the U.S. Department of Defense, supposedly one of the more secure state organizations we have working for us. Its impact clearly wasn’t lost on the Pentagon, whose blue sky research arm has launched a new project designed to ferret out malicious behavior on DoD networks. Named CINDER – Cyber INsiDER Threat – the project is designed not to sniff out people, but adversarial actions as they happen.

The future of reading might also be the future of writing, if author Neal Stephenson's new experiment is any indication.

Stephenson, author of the best-selling Cryptonomicon among other science fiction and historical fiction works, has unveiled a new digital-novel platform called PULP that incorporates glossaries, images, music and video into an open-source-style book. The story is written by a "cabal" of authors, and readers can contribute feedback and ideas as the story unfolds.

Stephenson's new company, Subutai, published the first chapter of its first book this week, called The Mongoliad, a medieval epic set in 1241 as Mongol invaders take over Europe.

Unless you’ve been living underneath a Zune, you’re likely aware that Steve Jobs and his Apple empire held a music-centric event in San Francisco today in which the company's best-selling line of portable musical devices received yet another refresh (the holidays are coming up, you know). And while some of the updates were the usual benign, tech trickle-down one might expect, Jobs did break some new ground with an Apple TV do-over and an iTunes update that’s more social network than music store.

Apparently, some tigers can change their stripes -- especially if they have books to sell. One of our favorite climate villains, the Danish economist Bjørn Lomborg, has apparently warmed to the idea of climate change, and now says it's a problem on which the world ought to spend $100 billion annually.

A University of Michigan researcher thinks we can triple the fuel economies in our petroleum-powered vehicles in the next 25 years. All we need to do is replace horsepower with brainpower.

Is everything in the universe made up of vibrating one-dimensional strings? For the first time, scientists think they can concretely test string theory, the mind-blowing “theory of everything” that has dominated physics for the past two decades. It turns out that string theory predicts the behavior of entangled quantum particles, which can be tested in a lab — therefore testing string theory.

Call it a crash course. A group of undergrads at the University of Colorado at Boulder got to participate in an unusual and awesome classroom activity on Monday, the culmination of a weeks-long process to decommission a NASA science satellite: they crashed a satellite into the atmosphere, sending it to a fiery death.