Archaeopteryx (Urvogel ) is the most primitive bird yet discovered.   Found in the 1860's, it has since been dated  to 150 million years ago but new microscopic imaging of its bone structure says this ancient critter grew less like what we think of as birds and more like dinosaurs.

The bones of more recent bird fossils like Confuciusornis from the Yixian Formation in China which are more recent than Archaeopteryx demonstrate rapid growth more similar to that of modern birds, which means rapid bone growth, considered a prerequisite for flight, was not necessary for taking to the air.

Researchers studying Rhesus Macaque mothers and writing on their results in Current Biology have determined that interactions of macaque mothers with their infants have a lot of similarity to human mothers in the first month of a newborn's life.

"What does a mother or father do when looking at their own baby?" asks Pier Francesco Ferrari of the Università di Parma in Italy. "They smile at them and exaggerate their gestures, modify their voice pitch—the so-called "motherese"—and kiss them. What we found in mother macaques is very similar: they exaggerate their gestures, "kiss" their baby, and have sustained mutual gaze."

No country is immune from gender discrimination, says the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Report, and most companies feel like they are gender neutral and perhaps are - but because people and perceptions are different it's dificult to say what is discrimination and what is sensitivity or even militancy.

It's not to say there aren't disparities - "No country in the world has yet managed to eliminate the gender gap"  they write in the report.   But it may be more looking for causation in the correlation than entrenche discrimination. 

If you're a child of the 1970s you remember peak oil - it was a book that claimed by 1992 we were going to reach maximum capacity and then it would gradually become more scarce.   If you're a fan of science fiction, it meant a world where oil was worth more than gold and we put machine guns on cars to fight over stuff.  More likely, we would come up with an alternative, but not before government lobbyists got subsidies for things we know won't work.

Herbal medicines are more common in Asian countries to treat pre-diabetes (impaired glucose tolerance or IGT), the precursor of diabetes but is there any hard scientific evidence to confidently recommend their use?

No.  That doesn't mean they aren't a viable treatment but, or that they haven't worked in some people, just like the confounding placebo effect, but more research would be needed to establish whether Chinese herbal medicines can reduce the likelihood of developing diabetes the way advocates claim.

A study combining family- and population-based approaches has uncovered a single-letter change in the genetic code that is associated with autism.  The finding implicates a neuronal gene not previously tied to the disorder and more broadly, underscores a role for common DNA variation. In addition, the new research highlights two other regions of the genome, which are likely to contain rare genetic differences that may also influence autism risk.