Relational aggression, such as malicious rumors, social exclusion and rejection, are considered something that girls do more often. The movie "Mean Girls" epitomized it to hilarious effect. A trio of scholars used surveys to show that boys are being shortchanged in popular accounts of mean-ness.

620 randomly selected sixth graders were followed through their senior year, filling out an annual survey talking about victimization. Using group-based trajectory modeling the female co-authors determined that boys are actually meaner than girls - or at least they brag about it more on surveys. Boys were more often to call themselves relational aggression perpetrators while girls reported being victims more.

In epidemiology, matching curves are often enough to imply causation and so it is often done, even if there is no evidence to warrant the link.

There has been an increased use of antibiotics and there are an increased number of diagnoses so some epidemiologists looked at those two curves in the same direction and suggested one may be causing the other. A new analysis of about 500,000 children published in BMJ dismisses those claims and finds that exposure to antibiotics during pregnancy or early in life does not appear to increase the risk of asthma. 

All aboard. Ben Birchall/PA

By Sarah Jewitt, University of Nottingham

A British “poo bus” went into service last week, powered by biomethane energy derived from human waste at a sewage plant.

shutterstock

By Carsten Maple, University of Warwick

Physician attitudes towards mental illness can reflect the general public's prejudice. Dariush M/ Shutterstock

By Adam Brenner, UT Southwestern Medical Center

Portuguese researchers have developed a new method which uses images of a protein in cells to quantify its distribution (how much protein there is, and where it is in the cell) for that population of cells.

The discovery has important medical implications because the cellular location of a protein is directly linked to its function, as proved when the new algorithm identified mutations that had the potential to lead to >human diffuse gastric cancer(HDGC).

Credit: EU

By David Glance, University of Western Australia

The Parliament of the European Union last week voted to call on member states and the European Commission to investigate the operation of search engines in Europe to ensure “a balanced, fair and open Internet search structure”.

Imagine a car that can't get dirty or a business in Ferguson, Missouri that can't be graffiti'ed by unhinged protesters.

It might be possible with a new class of highly fluorinated super-repellent polymer called a “fluoropore”, which mimics the natural ability of lotus plants and cabbage leaves to make water droplets simply roll away - but for oils too. This lotus effect has been used for producing rough surfaces with special chemical properties. “However, this trick does not work for oils – the lotus plant repels water, but no oil,” says Dr.-Ing. Bastian Rapp of the KIT Institute of Microstructure Technology. “Oil-repellent surfaces need to have another chemical structure, fluoropolymers, for this purpose.” 

The Arctic Ocean sea ice cover emerged 2.6 million years ago - and it hasn't changed since. Not in all of the recurring warming cycles we have had and not even in 2006, when pundits predicted it would be melted by 2014.

It wasn't always that way. Between 4 and 5 million years ago, the extent of sea ice cover in Arctic was much less than it is today. Recent IPCC reports believe that the expanse of the Arctic ice cover has been quickly shrinking since the 1970s and that 2012 was the known sea ice minimum in that time.