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A new study found that the brain responds to the sound of laughter and preps the muscles in the face to move in a way that corresponds to the sound. Researchers played a series of sounds to volunteers and measured their brain responses with an fMRI scanner. All the sounds triggered responses in the premotor cortical region of the brain, but the response was much higher for positive sounds like laughter, suggesting they are more contagious than negative sounds.

DEFINITION: (noun) A person who delivers a speech or oration. SYNONYMS: orator, public speaker, speechifier, speechmaker. USAGE: They continued to correspond, she in the unweighed language of unwavering affection, he in the chilly phraseology of the polished rhetorician.

Mary Todd Lincoln was a tragic figure of the American Civil War period. As First Lady, she was criticized for her use of taxpayers' money in refurbishing the White House and was even accused of being a Confederate spy. She struggled with depression after her husband's assassination and the deaths of two of her children, and she was committed to an insane asylum for three months in 1875. Where did she spend the four years following her release?

The first major naval battle of World War II, the Battle of the River Plate involved the German pocket-battleship Admiral Graf Spee, which had been commerce raiding since the start of the war. The Royal Navy's South American Division spotted it and engaged it off the estuary of the River Plate in South America. After the Graf Spee suffered superficial damages, its captain made what decision that is said to have infuriated Hitler?

The thylacine, or Tasmanian wolf, is a large carnivorous marsupial native to Australia. About the size of a collie, it has a long tail and a wolflike head with short ears and strong jaws and teeth. Its coat is brownish with a series of black stripes across the back. The last thylacine in captivity died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936, but a few individuals are believed to survive in wild areas of W Tasmania. Why have thylacines been hunted to near extinction?