If you have used voice-enabled speaker devices like the Amazon Echo, which for some reason goes by Alexa rather than Echo, you've noticed there are not a lot of great apps and most of them do very narrow things. They are more like public relations tools for brands.

Google is no better but companies insist it is the future, that is why Apple is getting into the game with Homepod. They all suffer from the problem that Apple created yet which is the trend, because if puts hundreds of billions of dollars in their bank account: They tell you what you want on their devices, and that's all you are going to get. You aren't smart enough to look through a free market and decide. So if they decide Lady Doritos really should be a thing, it's what you have.

Plant lovers love peat moss, it is the major component of potting mix and popular in greenhouses and gardens, but the 'back to nature' movement has caused it to be depleted faster than it can re-form, and it contributes to the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 

Science may have the solution. Similar to charcoal, biochar is produced through a process called pyrolysis, or heating to high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. And like charcoal, it can be derived from virtually any organic substance. To save the peat moss, we have to burn some other stuff. But even then burning is better for emissions than runaway peat moss exploitation by the organic community.

Though unusually ethically suspect supplement merchants have been marketing kratom, an analgesic made from the leaves of a tropical tree native to Southeast Asia, to treat opioid withdrawal symptoms, significant safety concerns exist.

And it turns out kratom itself is an opioid, finds an FDA study. 

The Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) project was launched in 2000 to create the first comprehensive images of atmospheric plasma in our magnetosphere, a kind of cosmic demilitarized zone with plasmas of both solar and terrestrial origin. It was still functioning in 2002 when it completed its initial go but then failed to make contact again on a routine pass by the Earth in 2005. 

And NASA lost track of it. Like all NASA missions, they can never say failure so even though it only did one thing they declared it worth the $150 million. 

Stereotype threat is a sociological invention which seeks to rationalized why some people don't perform as well as others. In biology, for example, if a group of women didn't fare well on tests sociologists argue that if there were not enough women in the classroom, women felt like they were representing women in biology and if they didn't do well, all women would look bad. And that pressure caused them to not do well.

Outside the social justice world, in the realm of data, there is one area where women are not being told by the social sciences they are too intimidated to compete: chess. There, it's game on. 

In the developed world, abortions are common despite ubiquitous condoms, birth control and even the "morning after pill" - about 6.7 million per year.

In Canada, the teen pregnancy rate is 28 per 1000, with more than 50 percent of those ending in abortion, so a study in Canadian Medical Association Journal decided to see what was different about teens who had an abortion versus teens that did not.