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Human males living with their moms may not expect to have much luck hooking up this Valentine’s Day. But among the northern muriqui monkeys, males that spend the most time around their mothers seem to get an added boost when mating time rolls around. [More]

You need to get out more.

Scientists are still trying to understand the full purpose of sleep.

These implements of warfare were developed to fill a perceived need or follow a specific doctrine. Some, such as the development of artillery, became a central facet during the Great War, the first “total war” that involved all of its citizens, industries and scientific ingenuity. [More]

February 1962 [More]

Gary Marcus suffers from what a friend jokingly describes as congenital arrhythmia--the inability, despite many hours of his youth spent practicing and taking lessons, to learn to play a musical instrument. A few years ago Marcus, a cognitive psychologist at New York University, decided at 38 to make one last try when he took up guitar. No surprise: He did not succeed in becoming the next Jimi Hendrix, but managed to acquire a modicum of skill--and went on to describe his experience in Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning

Two washing-machine-sized satellites recently went into orbit around the moon. In March, they’ll start to gather detailed data about the quirks of the moon’s gravity.

For centuries, the Dutch have built higher and higher dikes to keep waters at bay in a country where 55 percent of housing is located in areas prone to flooding. But climate change has convinced them this approach will no longer work, so the country is embarking on a mammoth task of moving dozens of dikes back to make room for swelling rivers

Two scientists who independently concocted potentially dangerous strains of bird flu viruses and have had the bioweapons community in a tizzy for the past month with the pending publication of their work today said that they would suspend their research for 60 days .

From Nature magazine [More]

Add methane emissions to the growing list of environmental risks posed by fracking.

Reprinted from Nature magazine [More]

Science on Ice: Four Polar Expeditions [More]

A couple of weeks ago, Huffington Post launched its Science section . I invited Cara Santa Maria, the science correspondent at Huffington Post to tell us more about this new endeavor. Bora Zivkovic: Hello, welcome to the Scientific American blog network.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined [More]