To sane people, parents who kill their kids are both horrifying and tragic, though levels of acceptance and blame flow with cultural trends. Once upon a time, when a mother in Texas killed her children in a bath tub, celebrities like Katie Couric blamed everyone but the murderer. Today, there is a lot less exculpatory rationalization about killers.

A new paper in Forensic Science International invokes correlations to psychology and biology and therefore might be used to make filicide exculpatory once again - with enough data, epidemiology can prove anything. 

People who live in cities love the infrastructure, the nightlife, the hobos, the fact that you can find a Starbucks on every corner. People who live in the country love the cleaner air, the openness, the fact that you can go for a walk without being accosted by hobos.

Is it just personal choice? If so, birds face many of the same dilemmas about how best to live life. Larger groups bring risks of disease and aggression by neighbors.

What other factors may be involved? 

A study led by Manchester scientists has shown promising results for a new treatment approach in follicular lymphoma.

Follicular lymphoma is a type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a blood cancer, that usually develops slowly but the majority of patients are diagnosed when their disease is already at an advanced stage.

Recent improvements in treatment have included the use of antibodies to specifically target the tumour cells and to stimulate the patient's own immune system to attack their tumor. The use of such antibodies has improved treatment response, but unfortunately most patients still relapse. Radioimmunotherapy – where a radioactive substance is attached to the antibody – has been shown to be successful in treating patients who had previously relapsed. 

Genetic engineering of tobacco plants so that they produce moth pheromones demonstrates the potential of genetically modified plants to act as factories for the synthesis of insect pheromones, write the authors of a Nature Communications paper.

Pheromones are widely used as an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional pesticides for trapping insects and the new work presents an opportunity for the cost-effective production of an environmentally safe alternative to insecticides. The demographic most likely to ban GMOs and tobacco aren't going to be happy, but they aren't happy with most science. Maybe if the work were done with marijuana it would be more acceptable.

If you ask aging environmental activists, the worst thing that can happen to nature is to have people step onto it.

This is the completely wrong approach, but one adopted by their corporate leaders in the last two generations when they found their donor base becoming increasingly urban. While it was once recognized that hunters, hikers and other sportsmen were obviously the most in love with nature, gradually they became treated like the enemy of environmentalists.

Is depression as dangerous as smoking?

A 12-person panel has published a paper in the journal Circulation saying that their review of literature indicates that depression should be listed with smoking, obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure as risk factors for heart disease.