In soccer, a team is most vulnerable to being scored on right after they score. Pundits and psychologists attribute that to overconfidence. Yet in the 2014 Super Bowl, the Seattle Seahawks dominated early and the Denver Broncos looked increasingly disorganized. Pundits and psychologists attribute that to momentum.

Momentum or overconfidence are often applied in hindsight to individual games but what about during winning streaks? Is what analysts term momentum a kind of competitive inertia, where a team in a state of winning tends to keep winning? 

No, say economists writing in Economics Letters, after examining varsity college hockey teams winning and losing records. Momentum advantages don't exist.

How smart do you have to be to convince Albert Einstein to change his mind?

Pretty smart. He never invoked 'the science is settled' or ridiculed the political party of physicists who insisted the universe was expanding. It was static until someone proved otherwise.

Eventually they did, but it was not the urban legend that claimed in 1931 American astronomer Edwin Hubble showed Einstein his observations of redshift in the light emitted by far away nebulae - what we call galaxies now. The tipping point was instead a tortuous thought process following many encounters with some of the most influential astrophysicists of his generation.

Ecstasy, marijuana (including synthetic cannabinoids sold as ‘Spice’ and ‘Incense’) and various psychoactive ‘legal highs’ have surged in popularity and Canada has become a major criminal hub for ecstasy. 

Recent deaths have been linked to paramethoxymethamphetamine (PMMA) in ecstasy pills and with Canadian producing most of the ecstasy in the North American market, a timely paper in Drug Science Policy and Law looks at trends in ecstasy adulteration and the facts around PMA/PMMA-linked deaths. 

In America, social authoritarians are ban-happy but the Canadian authors also argue for an alternative to a new ban.

The review finds: 

As if pretty people didn't have enough advantages, they may also give us a glance at their reproductive health, according to a paper in the American Journal of Human Biology reveals a link between Body Mass Index (BMI) and the amount of bacteria colonizing noses.

The results show that heavier men harbor more potentially pathogenic species of bacteria in their nose, compared with slimmer, more traditionally attractive men.

Julie Hartup, Mariana Islands Program Leader for the Manta Trust, has caught mantas on Guam in the act of having a party.

Several of Hartup's paddler and free diving friends told her about seeing mantas congregating in an area where surgeonfish were spawning, and they knew the exact date. With the date, Hartup was able to calculate the moon phase - many fish synchronize their spawning with the moon - and using this information she predicted when the spawning event would occur that upcoming year and was there to witness a shoal of spawning surgeonfish accompanied by a fever of mantas.

A mouse's heart beats about the same number of times in its lifetime as an elephant's, but a mouse only lives for about a year while an elephant will live to be about 70.

Why do small plants and animals mature faster than large ones? Why has nature chosen such radically different forms as the loose-limbed beauty of a flowering tree and the fearful symmetry of a tiger?