If you're a taxpayer in the UK, you get medical care for free - even if it's nothing at all.

A survey  conducted by the Universities of Oxford and Southampton found that 97% of UK doctors registered with the General Medical Council (GMC) have prescribed placebo treatments to patients at least once in their career. 

'Impure' placebos are treatments that are unproven, such as antibiotics for suspected viral infections, or more commonly non-essential physical examinations and blood tests performed to reassure patients. 'Pure' placebos are treatments such as sugar pills or saline injections which contain no active ingredients. 97% of doctors have used 'impure' placebo treatments while 12% have used 'pure' placebos.   

Beginning a few years ago, speculation began about when Voyager I would leave the solar system.  There was no sure way to know, the solar system has no official boundary, so scientists were looking for signs.

35 years after its launch, it seems Voyager 1 appears to have traveled beyond the influence of the Sun and exited the heliosphere, the region of space dominated by the Sun and its wind of energetic particles, and which is thought to be enclosed, bubble-like, in the surrounding interstellar medium of gas and dust that pervades the Milky Way galaxy. 

The giant squid is extremely rarely seen but remains are found in the formalin or ethanol collections of various museums.

 An international team has learned that no matter where in the world they are found, giant squid are so closely related at the genetic level that they represent a single, global population - despite previous statements, they are a single species worldwide. In 1857 the Danish naturalist Japetus Steenstrup determined that this beast was the same animal that gave rise to centuries of sailors' tales about monsters in the deep, later immortalized by writers such as Jules Verne and Herman Melville. He gave it the name Architeuthis dux.

Type 2 diabetes has a strong hereditary component, and while we can't change the genes we were born with, if epigenetics says a father eating a Twinkie before conception can lead to bad grades for the child in high school, why can't we modify the function of the genes through the epigenetic changes that take place in the course of life?

While there are still plenty of mysteries in electromagnetics, electrical engineers are sure of one thing; current is carried through materials by flowing electrons.

 In physics, Luttinger's theorem states that the number of electrons in a material is the same as the number of electrons in all of its atoms added together. Much-studied conducting materials, such as metals and semiconductors, have held true to the idea. 

The term 'elites' gets a bad rap in modern culture, mostly because political pundits use it to mean 'me and people I like' - elitism - rather than understanding what elite means.

Yet in sports we still recognize that there are elites. Don't like Usain Bolt's politics?  Beat him in a race. 

Some new research says that, as much as it might bother us, some elites are elite in many ways. Olympic medalists in volleyball, for example, perform better than the rest of us in how fast their brains take in and respond to new information, even if they are Republicans and social psychologists insist their brains are inferior.