The number of large earthquakes fell considerably in 2014, down to 12 from 19 in 2013. The trend was similar worldwide. Only 11 earthquakes reached magnitude 7.0-7.9 and one registered magnitude 8.2, in Iquique, Chile on April 1st. That was the lowest annual total of earthquakes magnitude 7.0 or greater since 2008, which also had 12. On average, since 1900 there have been 18 large earthquakes each year.

Millions of earthquakes occur throughout the world each year but most go undetected because they have very small magnitudes or hit remote areas.  In the United States, the US Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) publishes the locations for about 40 earthquakes per day. 

In many species of plants and animals, individuals from the same population often come in different color variants. It's always been that way but why one color doesn't eventually replace the others through natural selection is something of an evolutionary biology mystery.

Namely, how and why do variants of the same animal exist in nature? In theory, different color morphs (variants) should be equally subjected to natural selection. 

Can your online avatar say something about your personality that you haven't carefully chosen to be your public representation? It might say that some people are cats, or, since 85 percent of the female avatars of massively multiplayer online games are actually males, it might say that MMO participants have identity issues, but that does not mean it is so.

Nonetheless, psychologists at York University wanted to determine what personality traits are conveyed by a user's avatar - based on the belief that individuals typically choose and prefer avatars perceived to be similar to themselves.  Other studies claim they were who we want to be.

After a wildfire burns a large swath across timberlands, logging companies come in to do salvage logging - they clean up the timber that has not been completely destroyed by the fire. It's a good idea to get economic benefit from devastated land and otherwise it is just rotting tinder for the next fire.

Environmentalists, who object to even the most basic forest management in order to prevent fires, hate logging - even after a fire has burned the place down. They have been raising the alarm about salvage logging because the ecological effects are...unknown.

As World War II ended and the Holocaust became shockingly more real than the rumor or propaganda some believed it was, people wondered how it could happen. Why, somewhere along the way, did not more Germans involved in the genocide object? The same was asked of Stalin's Russia, Mao's China and Pol Pot's Cambodia.

In 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram set out to answer that, undertaking a series of now infamous experiments on obedience and reprehensible behavior. About two-thirds of Milgram's nearly 800 study subjects, pressed by an authoritative experimenter, were willing to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to an unseen stranger despite cries of agony and pleas to stop.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection has gotten a lot of attention. It is caused by a strain of staph bacteria that's become resistant to the antibiotics commonly used to fight it, but antibiotic resistance is not new. For as long as antibiotics have been manufactured (and nature shows evidence of it well before that) resistance evolves. 

Science has to stay a step ahead in the interests of public health and a new paper details a newly discovered antibiotic that eliminates pathogens without encountering any detectable resistance, which holds great promise for treating chronic infections like tuberculosis and those caused by MRSA.