But it turns out that the Los Angelenos who live closest to the San Andreas Fault are more affluent than those living further away. The key reason appears to be a law that was originally passed to reduce damage during a major quake, according to a new paper in the journal Earth's Future, which is published by the American Geophysical Union.

Texas Tech professor Katharine Hayhoe is among the American Geophysical Union's 2014 award-winners for science communication, announced on July 3. "She's someone who has been tireless in having the public understand climate change and climate change science. She excels at connecting with people in ways they can understand about why climate change science is important to them and their everyday lives," says AGU executive director Christine McEntee. "She's great at creating a two-way dialogue."

Summer sea ice in the Arctic got a respite this year, as did the Greenland ice sheet, because cooler summer temperatures prevented a repeat of 2012's record-setting melt. But the past seven summers have seen the lowest amounts of Arctic sea ice since satellite records began in 1979.

Perhaps the saddest byproduct of acts of orchestrated violence isn't the staggeringly high body counts that can accrue, but the bodies that aren't counted. Conflicts like the one that ripped apart the former-Yugoslav states in the 1990s and the ongoing crisis in Syria are generally marked by dually appalling statistical categories - the one counting the confirmed dead and the one tallying the missing, victims of atrocities or otherwise that are often buried without marker or record. Mexico is no stranger to such unmarked and often mass graves, a consequence of the ongoing drug-related violence there, so its perhaps an appropriate venue for researchers to launch a collaboration to develop new technological tools to help locate and exhume hidden graves.

With enormous sets of instruments and giga-amounts of data, it's easy to have too much information in science these days, requiring the careful sifting of signals to reach a target. But researchers can just as easily share their surpluses, and they probably should - time and again, one scientist's discarded data is another researcher's treasure. This time, a seismology tool used for monitoring underwater earthquakes is being used to track the endangered fin whale.