Psychology students, male and female, lie about their sexual behavior to match the cultural expectations of how they perceive other students believe men or women should act – even though they wouldn't distort other gender-related behaviors, a new paper has concluded.

Researchers have detected microplastic pollution - a concern in oceans because small bits of plastic can be harmful to fish and birds that feed on plankton or other small waterborne organisms
 - in one of Western Europe's largest lakes, Lake Geneva, in large enough quantities to raise concern.  

If you are a patient in the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS), try to have surgery on a Monday instead of a Friday, says a paper in the British Medical Journal.

The authors analyzed over four million elective procedures conducted in NHS hospitals in England between 2008 and 2011. They found that 27,582 patients died within 30 days of surgery and the mortality rate was lowest for patients having operations on Monday. Mortality increased for each subsequent day of the week. The odds of death were 44 per cent higher for operations on a Friday than a Monday.

Many seeds germinate in the soil and get their nutrition in the dark from limited reserves of starch and lipids, so as soon as possible they  grow toward light. Light-sensing proteins find the shortest route to sunlight – and then plants are even able to bend in the direction of the light source. 

Which gender is more generous? Given the social, subjective nature of the question and the influx of armchair philosophy into culture, everyone claims to have the right answer. What about an experiment?

A group of economists have found that, given the chance, women are more likely than men to avoid an opportunity to donate to charity.

The field experiment conducted by scholars at the University of Chicago and University of California, Berkeley tested people's motivations to give, whether they responded to social pressure or from an attitude of altruism, and concluded that when it's easy to avoid making a donation without being confrontational, such as not responding to a door-to-door solicitor, women are less likely than men to give.

Stromatolites, "layered rocks", are structures made of calcium carbonate and shaped by the actions of photosynthetic cyanobacteria and other microbes that trapped and bound grains of coastal sediment into fine layers. They showed up in great abundance along shorelines all over the world about 3.5 billion years ago and remain the earliest visible manifestation of life on Earth.