There are a number of government-funded campaigns to promote more participation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields, with the promise that a PhD means basic discovery and improving the human condition.

Yet what is left out of expensive marketing efforts is that there are now 6 PhDs for every job in academia - just because more people want to work at a university does not mean the government will increase funding to pay for it.  Instead of selling STEM careers to students, the National Science Foundation would be doing a greater service by showing students that academia is a lot like the corporate world - you will have to compete to get ahead, otherwise you will be trapped in a low-end job in a lab forever.

It's hard to have our steak and eat it too. Red meat was once implicated in a wave of studies and linked to heart disease and other maladies, before being absolved.

But the microbiome and the surge in advertising for probiotics to promote 'healthy' gut bacteria has implicated red meat again - this time by correlating a nutrient that the authors say is changed by gut bacteria into an atherosclerosis-causing metabolite, which means hardening of the arteries.

There is concern about pollution, overfishing and even climate change when it comes to reduced wild fish populations.

Farmed fish is the obvious solution but critics have a response for that also - they contend that hatchery-raised fish won't be as well adapted to their new environments or that the wild population will be "tainted" by breeding with domesticated counterparts.

In what they are terming the largest MRI study to date, a group of researchers writing in Cerebral Cortex have found that the brain anatomy in MRI scans of people with autism above age six is mostly indistinguishable from that of typically developing individuals and, therefore, of little clinical or scientific value.

It has slowly dawned on climate researchers that promoting the belief that curbing CO2 will prevent climate change has been a bad idea. American and European CO2 emissions have gone down, for example, but Asia's has risen, and we went beyond the 'point of no return' and not much has changed.

It was once the case that any mention of other climate-forcing gases got vitriol and hostile emails but now it is recognized that soot particles also contribute to global warming, along with methane. They just disappear quickly from the atmosphere. Short-lived climate pollutants (also known as Short Lived Climate Forcers - SLCF) also include sulfur dioxide, and to a much lesser extent fluorocarbons, but can have a measurable impact on the climate.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft visited the asteroid Vesta in 2011 and it showed that deep grooves circling the asteroid's equator were probably caused by a massive impact on Vesta's south pole.

A super high-speed cannon at NASA's Ames Research Center has shed new light on the violent chain of events deep in Vesta's interior that formed those surface grooves, some of which are wider than the Grand Canyon.

"Vesta got hammered," said Peter Schultz, professor of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown and the paper's senior author. "The whole interior was reverberating, and what we see on the surface is the manifestation of what happened in the interior."