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Nature is loaded with odd traits and behaviors. There are elephant trunks, the widely separated eyes of hammerhead sharks, and the wacky, effervescent mating dances that sandhill cranes do. But nothing is quite as strange as human crying. It does not seem odd to us, of course. We do it often enough ourselves and witness someone else doing it nearly every day. According to one study of more than 300 men and women conducted in 1980s at the University of Minnesota, women cry five times a month or so and men about once every four weeks....

A massive derailment of an Amtrak train in Philadelphia claimed the lives of at least six people and injured another 140 people on Tuesday night, just one of a handful of fatal train accidents this year. Derailments are by and large the leading cause of train crashes in the United States. Between 2001 and 2010, of the 58,299 train accidents that occurred, 54,889 were train derailments. That’s a staggering 94 percent....

Gay and bisexual men who want to donate blood after the shooting in Orlando, Florida, are largely unable to do so, because of a federal rule that prohibits men who are currently sexually active with other men from donating blood. Now, some are suggesting that it’s time for the Food and Drug Administration to reconsider the policy. The FDA’s blood donation guidelines—which all blood donation centers in the U.S. must follow—mandate that men who are sexually active with other men wait at least 12 months following their most recent sexual encounter before donating blood....

An ambitious effort to reconstruct the world’s first flower has seeded a debate over what forms a blossom can and cannot take. The project, called eFLOWER, combined an unparalleled database of plant traits, reams of molecular data on evolutionary relationships, and complex statistical models to determine what the ancestor of all modern flowering plants might have looked like. When its results were published last August, they drew intense interest from academics and the media....

DIGITAL STILL AND VIDEO CAMERAS fitted with large telephoto lenses make it possible for agents to discern the details of a faraway scene. An operative wielding a telephoto camera can read a newspaper headline (and, perhaps, subheads) from a football field’s length away. NIGHT-VISION GOGGLES or telescopes fitted with photomultiplier tubes can dramatically brighten available light; thermal sensors can reveal warm bodies and hot engines in total darkness. VOICE, facial features, walking gait and other characteristics can identify a person whose physical or behavioral traits are registered in an existing database....

David Bissell’s Toyota Tundra crunches to a stop in the reddish dirt and gravel road as the first heads appear in the grass. A few sheep come into view, but, startled by the trucks, they skitter away through the unruly vegetation surrounding a network of solar panels. After a few moments, they calm and return to work, munching away on the island’s ever-present guinea grass. These are the ovine foot soldiers in one of the most ambitious renewable energy revolutions in the United States....

Scientific American presents Savvy Psychologist by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. We’re in the home stretch of what some have called the worst winter in U.S. history. Trudging to dig out your car yet again, your temper may match the days: short, dark, and icy. This is the exact complaint that one Savvy Pscyhologist listener of Providence, RI emailed me about....

Saturn’s giant moon Titan glows in the dark like an enormous neon sign, a new study shows. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has spotted a glow emanating from Titan — not just from the top of the moon’s atmosphere, but also from deep within its nitrogen-rich haze. “This is exciting because we’ve never seen this at Titan before,” study lead author Robert West, a Cassini imaging team scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif....

Humanity has reached a new milestone in its dominance of the planet: human-made objects may now outweigh all of the living beings on Earth. Roads, houses, shopping malls, fishing vessels, printer paper, coffee mugs, smartphones and all the other infrastructure of daily life now weigh in at approximately 1.1 trillion metric tons—equal to the combined dry weight of all plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, archaea and protists on the planet. The creation of this human-made mass has rapidly accelerated over the past 120 years: Artificial objects have gone from just 3 percent of the world’s biomass in 1900 to on par with it today....

BOSTON — A private mission could return Martian samples to Earth by 2020 without even touching down on the Red Planet. The BoldlyGo Institute, a Colorado-based nonprofit, is working to develop the Sample Collection to Investigate Mars (SCIM) mission, which would send a spacecraft skimming through the atmosphere of Mars to gather dust and return home, without the difficulty of landing. SCIM could launch as soon as 2018, possibly returning samples to Earth in July 2020....

The automated speed traps that ward the approaches to Nabern, Germany, seem to be the only things that can wipe the smile off Rosario Berretta’s face. “Please slow down here,” he murmurs darkly as our vehicle nears the outskirts of the picturesque Swabian village. Berretta leads a team that is preparing a fleet of 60 of DaimlerChrysler’s latest hydrogen fuel-cell car, the F-Cell, for testing worldwide. The aim is to allow automakers to evaluate the pollution-free, energy-efficient vehicles in diverse driving conditions....

Weighing in at only 40 grams, brown mouse lemurs are one of the smallest species of primate in the world. Their diminutive size, as well as their nocturnal, tree-dwelling lifestyle, makes them difficult to track and observe. Sarah Zohdy, then a graduate student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, and her colleagues came up with an ingenious way to study the interactions of these small lemurs: they followed their lice....

Last December the Trump transition team asked the Department of Energy for a list of employees who had worked on or attended meetings about how to calculate the hidden costs of carbon pollution. The doe refused, but coming from a new administration whose leader has tweeted that global warming is a Chinese hoax, this sounded like the beginning of a political witch hunt. If so, it wouldn’t be the first. In 2009, during the so-called Climategate affair, climate “skeptics” released e-mails purporting to show that scientists were manipulating data and suppressing critics (several investigations proved that these charges were groundless)....

By Steve Gorman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Rain and cooler temperatures in California’s rugged Sierra Nevada brought welcome relief on Thursday to fire crews battling flames that have destroyed a dozen homes and threatened thousands more during the past two weeks near Lake Tahoe. A firefighting force now numbering 8,000 personnel, the most ever deployed against a single California wildfire, had carved buffer lines around 43 percent of the blaze’s perimeter as of Thursday morning, fire command spokesman Mike McMillan said....

CYBORG HUMANITY I was struck that of the “important ethical issues” Henry Markram refers to regarding building a completely simulated human brain in “The Human Brain Project,” the only one he raises is that of a superintelligent nemesis being created. He does not appear to consider the ethical obligations we would have toward the mind we had created. I worry about the precarious humanity of the minds we would create and about the humanity of the researchers who could, with the touch of a button, give a being with memories and an expectation of the future—if this all works as Markram hopes it will—autism, schizophrenia or a progressively degenerative disease....

Some 23 percent of all the calories consumed by the world’s population come from rice, making it one of the most important foodstuffs on the planet. Now scientists in Japan and China report that they have developed a hardier rice plant that resists collapsing in inclement weather, leading to higher crop yields. The results, the researchers say, could “pave the way for a new green revolution.” A team of investigators led by Motoyuki Ashikari of Nagoya University and Hitoshi Sakakibara of the Plant Science Center in Yokohama, Japan, analyzed the rice genome and identified several regions of DNA tied to improved grain yields....

In the days following a lung transplant, a condition known as primary graft dysfunction can prevent the organ from properly taking in and circulating oxygen. The disorder afflicts 10 to 25% of patients, studies estimate. It proves lethal nearly half the time. Researchers have now developed sensors that rapidly screen donor lungs for molecular warning signs of this disorder before the organs reach patients (Sci. Adv. 2015, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1500417). Although surgeons already have methods to examine donor lungs for biomarkers linked to primary graft dysfunction, these techniques require several hours to report results—more time than transplant surgeons typically have....

South Korean economist Hoesung Lee, a professor at the Korea University in Seoul, was elected as the fourth chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on October 6 during a meeting in Dubrovnik, Croatia. He previously served as a vice-chair of the IPCC. Lee, who beat out several candidates for the panel’s top job, has said that he wants the IPCC to focus on “policy relevance and neutrality”, to increase participation by experts from developing nations and to explore ways to involve business and industry in the IPCC process....

Key concepts Psychology Attention Working memory Communication Introduction Have you ever told a friend or family member something only to later find that he or she completely misunderstood you—or never heard you at all? People often tell each other about important information that is not properly received, even when the conversation occurs in a quiet setting at close range. Why does this happen? In this activity, you will learn why communication can be so difficult by probing the psychology of listening....

On January 6 an asteroid-spotting telescope at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico detected a new and unusual object in the night sky. Towing a streaky debris tail, the object was classified as a comet, although its orbit belied a different origin. Visible comets generally have elongated orbits that carry them into Earth’s neighborhood from the colder outer reaches of the solar system, but the newfound body had a neat, nearly circular orbit in the Asteroid Belt [the green ring in the video below], between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter....