In the modern era, a great deal of policy decisions are made by people who do not report to the public. If the EPA agrees to settle a lawsuit with canoers by calling water a pollutant, they can just do it, and stick local government with a $500 million liability. 

The 500 million years after Earth formed were not the hot, lava-filled Hell commonly portrayed, it may have had oceans, continents and active crustal plates - a lot like we have today.

This alternate view of Earth's first geologic eon, called the Hadean, gets support from the first detailed comparison of zircon crystals that formed more than 4 billion years ago with those formed contemporaneously in Iceland, which has been proposed as a possible geological analog for early Earth.

For the last decade, political science has been engaged in an effort to make all political behavior a function of biology, much the same way evolutionary psychologists make everything about sex. 

A new paper goes beyond suspect fMRI imaging interpretation and surveys of college students and makes the case that political leaning can be predicted by a preference for...body odor. 

"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" biologists once said - meaning that an animal's "ontogeny", its embryonic development, replays its entire evolutionary history.

Today our understanding a more nuanced and a better way to figure out how animals evolved is to compare regulatory networks that control gene expression patterns, particularly embryonic ones, across species.  But that task can be humbling, according to Stowers Institute for Medical Research Scientific Director Robb Krumlauf, Ph.D. and colleagues, who show that the sea lamprey Petromyzon marinus, a survivor of ancient jawless vertebrates, exhibits a pattern of gene expression that is reminiscent of its jawed cousins, who evolved much, much later.

At nearly 100 feet long and weighing as much as 170 tons, the blue whale is the largest creature on the planet, and by far the heaviest living thing ever seen on Earth. So there's no way it could have anything in common with the tiniest fish larvae, which measure millimeters in length and tip the scales at a fraction of a gram, right?

Not so fast, says L. Mahadevan, Professor of Applied Mathematics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and of Physics at Harvard. 

Using simple hydrodynamics, Mahadevan and colleagues that a handful of principles govern how virtually every animal -- from the tiniest fish to birds to gigantic whales propel themselves though the water.