Exactly 20 years ago, I wrote an article for Scientific American that, in draft form, had the headline above. My editor nixed it, so we went with something less dramatic: "In the Beginning…: Scientists are having a hard time agreeing on when, where and—most important—how life first emerged on the earth." That editor is gone now, so I get to use my old headline, which is even more apt today.

Visit Pssst Post: Pssst.... Don’t tell the creationists, but scientists don’t have a clue how life began

Web publishers are starting to believe, according to The New York Times, that the most effective way to build a following is to find readers on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, an approach being coined as S.M.O., or social media optimization. This could have multiple effects, one of which is setting a standard for the quality of articles floating around in cyberspace and crawled by Google, since the best way to get links on Twitter is to write something people want to read and share with friends.

Visit Pssst Post: Pssst.... Google is testing new "social search" feature, steering away from pure S.E.O.