It’s a question that tends to arise when a neighborhood mutt sees a cat at 3 a.m., or if you live in an apartment above someone who leaves their small, yapping dog alone all day: Why do dogs bark so much?

Perhaps because humans designed them that way.

“The direct or indirect human artificial selection process made the dog bark as we know,” said Csaba Molnar, formerly an ethologist at Hungary’s Eotvos Lorand University.

Molnar’s work was inspired by a simple but intriguing fact: Barking is common in domesticated dogs, but infrequent if not downright absent in their wild counterparts. Wild dogs ...

The Navy’s newest warship is slowly disappearing, one molecule at a time.

This isn’t a sequel to the 1984 sci-fi flick The Philadelphia Experiment, in which a Navy destroyer-escort vanishes through a time portal in Pennsylvania only to reappear in Nevada, 40 years later.

No, this time the disintegration is real. And so is the resulting tension between the Navy and the disappearing warship’s upstart builder.

The afflicted vessel is USS Independence, the second in the sailing branch’s fleet of fast, reconfigurable Littoral Combat Ships. Eventually, these ships are supposed to be the “workhorses” o...