Depending on the species, males have different strategies to try and insure that they reproduce, rather than just being a step-parent.

They may try to ensure paternity by increased surveillance and fighting off the competition, they may have more frequent sex with their long-term partners, they may physically punish unfaithful females or refuse to parent potentially unrelated offspring.

Most people, including many scientists and electrical engineers, have never heard of Wilhelm Josef Sinsteden.  He invented the lead-acid battery and published his findings in 1854.  In 1860 an improved construction by Gaston Raimond Planté was the first commercially viable version.  It is probably the wide marketing and adoption of the Planté cell which has led to so many books and articles - even a majority of scientific papers - stating that Planté invented the first of these batteries, usually giving 1859 as the date. 

What was the diet and movements of the first New Zealanders like?

Isotopes from their bones and teeth can tell us. Researchers say they have been
able to identify what is likely to be the first group of people to colonize Marlborough's Wairau Bar, possibly from Polynesia around 700 years ago. They also present evidence suggesting that individuals from two other groups buried at the site had likely lived in different regions of New Zealand before being buried at Wairau Bar. 

The researchers undertook isotopic analyses of samples recovered from the koiwi tangata (human remains) of the Rangitane iwi tupuna (ancestors) prior to their reburial at Wairau Bar in 2009. 

The Karoo Array Telescope (KAT-7) in South Africa, the pathfinder radio telescope for the $3 billion global Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, has released its first results.

In the ongoing struggle between the Representative of the 21st District of Texas, Lamar Smith, and all that is holy about the peer review grant process, the battle lines are getting clearer.

Finally the decay of Higgs bosons to b-quark pairs is emerging from LHC data, too.

 4C+29.30, a galaxy located some 850 million light years from Earth, has a new composite image which shows how the intense gravity of a supermassive black hole can be tapped to generate immense power.

 This multi-wavelength view reveals that the radio emission of 4C+29.30 comes from two jets of particles that are speeding at millions of miles per hour away from a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The estimated mass of the black hole is about 100 million times the mass of our Sun. The ends of the jets show larger areas of radio emission located outside the galaxy. 

An analysis of 4,000 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on the topic of global warming and climate change has revealed an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that recent warming is human-caused.

There's no awareness issue in climate change - almost no one on the planet hasn't heard of it or lacks an opinion.

62% of Americans believe global warming is happening - which means 38% do not. Like evolution or anti-science beliefs about genetic modification and vaccines and autism, the majority may fall along particular cultural lines but acceptance is still a problem that defies easy categorization and stereotypes. Yet framing and deficit thinking have all been tried, and they have made the problem worse. Instead of leading to more science acceptance, opinion on the climate now goes up and down with media reports about the weather.

A year after the 2009 human H1N1 pandemic began, researchers detected the H1N1 virus in free-ranging northern elephant seals off the central California coast. It is the first report of that flu strain in any marine mammal.

H1N1 originated in pigs. It emerged in humans in 2009, spreading worldwide as a pandemic. The World Health Organization now considers the H1N1 strain from 2009 to be under control, taking on the behavior of a seasonal virus.