In the modern American political climate, we see echoes of 40 years ago, when Richard Nixon was president. Federal agencies are being used as hatchetmen for the administration, copies of messages mysteriously get lost when subpoenaed by Congress, and if anyone objects to domestic spying, we are told it's to stop terrorism.

Stopping terrorism seems to be an agreeable notion to people, that is why it has become a blanket excuse for all kinds of government conduct. 

And it has even become a way to use medical care.

A new analysis by Karolinska Institutet in Sweden found that drug therapy for ADHD does not entail an increased risk of suicide attempts or suicide. 

Other studies have found  that ADHD drug treatment would increase the occurrence of suicidal thoughts but the authors of the new paper in BMJ say those studies were too small scale and/or methodologically unsound, which make the results uncertain. For the new paper, the authors used national patient registers to identify all patients in Sweden diagnosed with ADHD between 1960 and 1996; a total of 37,936 individuals. These people were then followed over the period 2006-2009, in terms of drug treatment and events that could be linked to suicide attempts and suicide. 

Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and Developoment (OECD) countries that lead in innovation are easy to spot - you look for the ones that have the most scientists in the private sector. 

Countries like the United States, Korea and Japan are responsible for the bulk of the world's technology design and they have over 75% of researchers employed in the private sector. 

In other OECD countries, the numbers are much lower - scientists are instead government employees and the need for innovation is last. This worries Spain, where research and innovation lags. In OECD countries overall, only 45.4% of scientists work in the private sector, the rest are being funded by taxes rather than corporate profits. In Spain, it is half that.

20 year ago, some teens were always trying to get sex - and they talked about it. But their behavior was not stored in an NSA database somewhere.

If it were stored with the IRS, such discussions might be safe because they could be lost with a Nixon-ian phone call or two, but otherwise someone can find out about sexy talk in the modern age - "sexting". A new psychology paper surveyed college students (naturally) and found that more than 50 percent of those surveyed reported that they had exchanged sexually explicit text messages, with or without photographic images, as minors.

American children learn the meanings of number words gradually: First they understand "one," then they add "two, "three," and "four," in sequence. At that point, however, a dramatic shift in understanding takes place, and children grasp the meanings of not only "five" and "six," but all of the number words they know.

During evolutionary diversification of vertebrate limbs, the number of toes in even-toed ungulates such as cattle and pigs was reduced and transformed into paired hooves. Scientists at the University of Basel have identified a gene regulatory switch that was key to evolutionary adaption of limbs in ungulates.