In modern NASA culture, extended spaceflight might as well be science fiction. The no-risk requirement coupled with volumes of employment criteria, rules and regulations were why the Constellation program was going to take far longer to go back to the moon than it took to go there in the first place and there is no serious manned exploration in the works.

Nonetheless, the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, would like to get more funding to create a health framework and they even make a recommendation that is positively un-government-like: allow exceptions to existing health standards on a mission-by-mission basis, but they dutifully qualify that any exceptions should be rare and occur only in extenuating circumstances. 

 There are various efforts to try and spur more equality among genders in certain fields. Companies say they don't care about gender - and they don't, unless government forces them to hire people to fill in boxes on government forms.  They say they just want the best people and they can't hire people who don't show an interest in working there. Gender activists say the task falls to companies to change how they approach potential hires, an idea which doesn't please anyone except gender activists.

Sometimes errors happen, sometimes fraud happens. Sometimes methodology is suspect.

Andalusian researchers, led by the University of Granada, have discovered a curious characteristic of the members of the human lineage, classed as the genus Homo: they are the only primates where, throughout their 2.5-million year history, the size of their teeth has decreased alongside the increase in their brain size.

The key to this phenomenon, which scientists call "evolutionary paradox", could be in how Homo's diet has evolved. Digestion starts first in the mouth and, so, teeth are essential in breaking food down into smaller pieces. Therefore, the normal scenario would be that, if the brain grows in size, and, hence, the body's metabolic needs, so should teeth.

The centimeter-sized fragments and smaller particles that make up the regolith — the layer of loose, unconsolidated rock and dust — of small asteroids is formed by temperature cycling that breaks down rock in a process called thermal fatigue, according to a paper in Nature.

Like everything else in science and medicine, there is modern controversy about circumcision. In the United States the rate of circumcision is around 81%.

A paper in Mayo Clinic Proceedings finds that the benefits of infant male circumcision to health exceed the risks by over 100 to 1. Brian Morris, Professor Emeritus in the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Sydney and his colleagues in Florida and Minnesota found that over their lifetime half of uncircumcised males will contract an adverse medical condition caused by their foreskin. The findings add considerable weight to the latest American Academy of Pediatrics policy that supports education and access for infant male circumcision.