It’s easy to feel deflated by the ever-growing raft of ecological problems out there. According to a recent MIT report, even if I were the most frugal of consumers—say a monk or a hobo—as an American, I’d still emit more than twice as much carbon dioxide as the average global citizen. That's partly because the U.S. infrastructure that we all enjoy (police, roads, hospitals) is an inevitable part of our per-capita contribution. Think globally, act locally?

The famed molecular biologist Francis Crick turned to neuroscience in the 1970’s. But by 1993, he was so chagrined by the ignorance of his new field that he penned an editorial in the journal Nature. “It is intolerable that we do not have [a connection map of] the human brain,” he wrote. “Without it there is little hope of understanding how our brains work except in the crudest way.”

There was no such map in 1993 because the only way to get one was to use anatomical methods: inject dye into the brain of an organism, kill it, and trace the color trail in the neurons with microscopes. Of course ethics rule out this sort of experimentation on humans.

Discovery Channel addicts, get outside! HDTV may offer a vivid window on the natural world, but it won’t substitute for the real thing. That’s the implication from a new psychological study from the University of Washington’s Human Interaction with Nature and Technological Systems (HINTS) Lab, which found, in fact, that nature on a plasma screen is no more soothing than a blank wall.

The results of the first national survey of teachers about evolution in their classrooms are in. Darwin would quiver in his boots to learn that in this day and age, one in eight American biology teachers teach creationism and intelligent design as a sound alternative to his theory. In fact, 13 percent of the country’s teachers think they can run an excellent biology class without even mentioning Darwin or evolution.

Retreating glaciers. Melting permafrost. Off-kilter bird migrations. Few of these reports are news to anyone following the global warming beat. Yet the first effort to gather thousands of scientific findings into a cohesive narrative of cause and effect has been published in the journal Nature.

In many Asian countries, the cultural preference for boys is resulting in lopsided sex ratios. To those who assume theres no prenatal sex discrimination in the United States, think again. The first published analysis of its kind, which appears in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals that some—but not most—Asian families in America are choosing to have a son after one or more daughters.

We all know that women outlive men. But there's some good news for XYs: since the 1970s, the gender gap in life expectancy has shrunk. Now, a study released Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explains a major reason why. Surprisingly, the answer has little to do with eating fewer Big Macs. Since the 1970s, more baby boys are surviving birth in the first place.

The study authors analyzed more than 250 years of mortality data from 15 developed countries. Turns out that in 1751, males were only 10 percent more likely to die at birth than females. But that disadvantage increased until its peak of 30 percent around 1970. Since then, remarkably, it has declined.

When there is only one skull to study and at least 65 scientists studying it, you bet there will be squabbling.

Ive been following the scientific news of the diminutive Flores hominids—the meter-high beings with brains the size of an orange—ever since the astonishing fossils were first discovered on the Indonesian island in 2004. Recently, three new papers have emerged, and now things are really getting weird.