Five-month-old Ndeze Heidrun Simm. Courtesy Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International

Authorities still do not know who has been murdering mountain gorillas in Congo’s Virunga National Park, as my colleague Scott Johnson detailed in this week’s cover story. But as word of the seven murders—some call them assassinations, since they may be intended to send a political message to park officials and rangers—spreads through the conservation community, a sense of their enormity is now setting in.

“This is the worst single incident in 30 years, in a region that is normally seen as the only success story for gorillas across the continent,” said Russell A. Mittermeier, president of Conservation International and chairman of the Primate Specialist Group of the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission. “If we can’t stop these attacks, our closest living relatives will disappear from the planet.”

One of the mysteries of the murders is that the killers left valuables behind: two gorilla infants. A baby can bring thousands of dollars on the black market. But 5-month-old Ndeze, as park rangers named him, survived the July 22 attack by unknown assailants on the Rugendo gorilla group that killed Senkwekwe, the dominant silverback, and three adult females (another adult female is missing and presumed dead). Ndeze was carried by his brother from the slaughter; both were later found by members of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Program and Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN). They had to tranquilize the brother to rescue the infant, who would have died from lack of care.

Any Dallas Mavericks fans who groaned when the execrable Golden State Warriors knocked their team out of the NBA playoffs this spring, or New York Yankees diehards still shaking their heads that their 97-65 (regular season) team watched as the 83-78 St. Louis Cardinals went home with World Series rings last year, take heart: two physicists have devised a way to make 99 percent sure that the “best” team really does win.

Sure, upsets spice up the game. But let’s get real: the 91-71 Florida Marlins as the 2003 world champions and not, say, the 101-61 Atlanta Braves or Yankees? Over the last 100 years, find Eli Ben-Naim and Nicolas Hengartner of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the lower-ranked baseball team “had an astounding 44% chance of defeating” a higher-ranked team. Fans know that this reflects the fact that even a worse team can have a terrific pitcher, and a better team can suddenly find itself putting on the mound someone who just flew in from the minor leagues to fill a gap in the rotation, or that a few bad bounces can determine a game, among other quirks that make the sport exciting. The result, of course, is that “even after a long series of competitions, the best team does not always finish first,” the scientists write in an upcoming paper in the journal Physical Review E.

The strongest genetic predictor for violence and aggression is . . . having a Y chromosome. Four times more males than females suffer from antisocial personality disorder, which is characterized by impulsive aggression, and a glance at any police blotter shows which sex commits more violent crimes. While the way we raise boys has something to do with that, there is good reason to believe that testosterone is not exactly an innocent by-stander. Men average several times the amount of testosterone that women do, for one thing, and a pile of studies implicate testosterone in aggression. Call it the original cause of ‘roid rage.

Trouble is, scientists have not nailed down exactly how testosterone increases the likelihood that a man will punch his fist through a wall (or someone’s face). A new study provides the first evidence of how testosterone’s effects on the brain might do that. Elevated levels of this steroid hormone, scientists in the Netherlands find in a study to be published in the August issue of Psychological Science, seem to mess up the brain’s ability to notice and understand angry facial expressions.

As I walked from my house to the train station during last week’s torrential downpour in New York, I found myself in need of a 21^st-century Sir Walter Raleigh (you know, he who spread his cloak over a puddle in 1581 so Queen Elizabeth I would not get her feet wet). A cloak wasn’t going to do it for me, though: the intersection I needed to cross to reach the street climbing up to the station had become a 2-foot-deep lake, judging by where the water reached on cars intrepid enough to try to get through. A garbage can bobbed along in the current. I flagged down a passing car, who drove me around the block rather than through the flood.

This comes to mind on yet another morning of torrential rain in the city because of a new study, to be published later this week in the journal Nature (subscription required). Scientists compared global rainfall records from 1925 to 1999 to various models of precipitation: those that include only natural causes (normal variability in the planet’s climate system and changes due to volcano eruptions, for instance), those that include only human effects (release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere) and those that include both. Their conclusion: human activity “has had a detectable influence on observed changes in average precipitation,” they write, and these changes “cannot be explained by internal climate variability or natural forcing.” (Natural forcing includes things like changes in solar output as well as volcanoes.) In fact, “the estimated contribution of natural forcing to observed zonal precipitation trends is small in relation to the estimated contribution from anthropogenic [that is, manmade] forcing,” the scientists conclude.

Right-wing opponents of immigration and of what they called “amnesty” for illegals weren’t the only ones celebrating last month’s defeat of the White House-backed immigration bill.

In 2002 I was naïve enough to write a column channeling the angst of technology CEOs about the “shortage” of scientists and engineers (a theme that has been sounded since the 1980s, when the National Science Foundation projected a shortfall of about 675,000 over the following two decades, something that never materialized, as discussed in a paper by MIT mathematician Eric Weinstein). Scores of engineers, in particular, wrote to me. In addition to pointing out my basic stupidity (well, credulity), they explained that the career prospects of an engineer these days are so bleak they steer their children away from the field. Most of all, they argued that the shortage is and was a myth.

No wonder, then, that engineers are cheering the defeat of the immigration bill, which would have increased the number of high-tech employees that companies could bring in on temporary H-1B visas from the current 65,000 per year to 115,000 and eventually to as many as 180,000.

The ink was hardly dry on last week’s report taking NASA to task for being so narrow-minded about what form alien life might take and what conditions it could live in when researchers showed that old-think has some life in it yet, no pun intended. Writing in today's issue of the journal Nature, an international team analyzing data from NASA’s Spitzer telescope, which orbits Earth, announced the first-ever discovery of water on a planet beyond the Sun--and got all excited about how important this is for the question of life beyond Earth.

More than 200 such “extra-solar” planets have been discovered, orbiting other stars. The water is actually in the planet’s atmosphere rather than sloshing around on its surface (the astronomers deduced this from how the planet absorbs starlight when it passes in front of its star, in the constellation Vulpecula—“the Fox”—64 light years away; only water vapor would produce the spectrum the Spitzer telescope captured).

The planet has the less-than-inspiring name HD 189733b, and although it is far from habitable (it is a giant gas bag, like Saturn, and 30 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun, which makes it broiling hot: 1,340 degrees F.) the fact that it contains water suggests that the stuff might not all that rare in the galaxy.

Just to double-check that all the glowing accounts of the sacrifices that the "greatest generation" made during World War II weren't just nostalgia-laced propaganda, I called my favorite 80-year old. Sure enough, she remembered the rationing of gasoline and butter, Victory Gardens and--this one is particularly hard to imagine--saving aluminum foil rather than tossing it after a use or two.

These thoughts came to mind after the Live Earth concerts and the MoveOn-sponsored candidates' debate on climate change, both last Saturday. At the concerts, performers urged us to . . . turn off the shower while we shaved our legs. Among the six "actions against the climate crisis" we were asked to pledge were changing four standard light bulbs in our home to compact fluorescents, buying energy-efficient appliances, shutting off energy-using equipment when not in use, and riding public transit or carpooling once a week.

Flicking off the light switch when I leave a room now counts as doing my part to avert a climate crisis? Isn't it great to live in a time when it's so easy to feel virtuous?

Water, water, water—whether on Mars or on Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede and Callisto, scientists looking for signs of life beyond Earth have long assumed that life needs water. The only requirement that gets equal billing is the presence of organic molecules, which is why the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, which is loaded with organics, is so intriguing to astrobiologists. But while astronomers (and sci-fi fans) have said for decades that discovering extraterrestrial life would be the most revolutionary finding in the history of science, they have not faced the flip side of this contention: that “nothing would be more tragic in the American exploration of space than to encounter alien life without recognizing it.”

So concludes a new report from the National Research Council, part of the National Academies, released this afternoon. “The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems”—or, as it’s become known, the “weird life” report—was requested by NASA, and the space agency comes across as having about as much imagination as an amoeba. By assuming that ET would run on the same biochemistry as life on Earth—an attitude the panel calls “terracentricity”—NASA has foolishly limited its search for life beyond Earth, the 11-person panel of scientists concludes.

In particular, NASA is “focused on locations where liquid water is possible, and it emphasizes searches for structures that resemble cells of terran organisms . . . and tests for amino acids and nucleotides similar to those found in terrestrial proteins and DNA,” says the report. But “if life originated independently, even within our own solar system, it might have nonterran characteristics and, thus, not be detectable by NASA’s” missions, which are “designed explicitly to detect terran biomolecules or their products. Further, if life is possible in solvents other than liquid water, it might exist in planetary environments other than the few that are currently targeted.”

The unwarranted assumption that life requires water has led astronomers studying Mars for signs of past or present life to rule out anyplace without liquid water. But ammonia or formamide could also serve as biosolvents. As it happens, mixtures of liquid water and ammonia may lurk within Titan, leading the panel to recommend that NASA give a higher priority to missions to that Saturnian moon.

Weird life might also use hereditary material different from terran life, where DNA is made of four molecules called nucleotides. The new field of synthetic biology—creating life or its building blocks in the lab—has created hereditary molecules using six or more nucleotides. And rather than relying on a carbon-based metabolism, as terran life does, weird life could get energy from a reaction of sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid, breaking free of the carbon assumption. “Life is possible in forms different than those on Earth,” said oceanographer John Baross of the University of Washington, who chaired the committee. But we won't find it with the blinkers NASA's been wearing.

“Omigod I am so glad you’re here! I tried to text you and had no service, but I so wanted to ask if you were okay after what you texted me before because I was so worried, I mean, I had no idea what was up with you . . ."

"Yo"

If you had to guess which greeting came from a male and which from a female, you undoubtedly identified the first as uttered by a girl and the latter by a boy. Not so fast.

For 15 years the claim has been floating around that females talk more than men, with last year’s popular book “The Female Brain,” by neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, asserting that women use 20,000 words per day while men manage to spit out a mere 7,000. In reality, these estimates are based on little-to-no data. One study that tried to be systematic gave manual tape recorders to 153 volunteers in Britain, and estimated that women speak 8,805 words per day and men, 6,073. But the researchers had no say in whether the volunteers turned off the recorders, or even knew when they did so, making it possible that the verbal gap reflected men’s reluctance to be recorded.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have done better. For eight years James Pennebaker and colleagues gave volunteers electronically activated digital recorders. The devices were programmed to record for 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes, night and day, for two to 10 days. The participants neither knew when the device was on nor could activate or deactivate it manually. Analyzing the transcripts of 396 students in the U.S. and Mexico, the scientists find that women speak about 16,215 words per day and men about 15,669, they report in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Science, a difference that was statistically insignificant.

For those of you who have been disappointed by your scores on the science or environment portions of the Newsweek online quiz that ran in conjunction with our double issue on "What You Need to Know," rest assured: you are in good company.

Fifty years ago, British novelist and scientist C.P. Snow lamented the existence of "two cultures," the humanities and the sciences. In his 1956 essay and again in a series of lectures and a book by the same name, he noted that a gathering of intellectuals would be aghast if one of their number did not know who Shakespeare was. But there would be no such reaction if someone did not know the second law of thermodynamics.

Now that science and technology underpin the world economy and give nations a competitive edge as never before, it would be nice to report that science illiteracy is, among educated people, a thing of the past. Not even close.

See how a panel of accomplished writers and, yes, scientists did when the British newspaper The Guardian asked them such basics as the age of the Earth.