Dr. Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) and Andrew (Miles Teller) in Whiplash

By Lauren Rosewarne, University of Melbourne

A decade of piano lessons with a woman who never allowed my lack of passion, prowess or practice ruin a good thing, exists as a mere red herring.

A good woman, a sane woman, but even ten years with her wasn’t enough to ameliorate the (mis)education I got from music classes in primary school.

Where it begins. Nature

By Andy Tattersall, University of Sheffield

Dirty Harry once said, “Opinions are like assholes; everybody has one”. Now that the Internet has made it easier than ever to share an unsolicited opinion, traditional methods of academic review are beginning to show their age.

We can now leave a public comment on just about anything – including the news, politics, YouTube videos, this article and even the meal we just ate. These comments can sometimes help consumers make more informed choices. In return, companies gain feedback on their products.

There are cosmic alignments over the largest structures ever discovered in the Universe - the rotation axes of the central supermassive black holes in quasars billions of light years apart are parallel to each other. 

Quasars are galaxies with very active supermassive black holes at their centers. These black holes are surrounded by spinning discs of extremely hot material that is often spewed out in long jets along their axes of rotation. Quasars can shine more brightly than all the stars in the rest of their host galaxies put together.

A new America? Warner Bros. Pictures

By Peter Bloom, The Open University

"Interstellar" has been praised for its attempt to make the “hard science” of astrophysics both accessible and exciting to a popular audience.

Through cutting-edge special effects, it takes audiences on a journey through space and time. It does so by drawing on groundbreaking scientific theories involving relativity, wormholes, black holes and the power of gravity.

You're twice as likely to chat about vaping than you were in 2013. Tibanna79

By Robbie Love, Lancaster University

Selfies were so 2013. But vaping’s in: Oxford Dictionaries have announced vape as its international Word of the Year 2014.

The runners up are bae, budtender, contactless, indyref, normcore and slacktivism.

E-cigarettes should not be sold in Australia, as a therapy or a consumer product. gdvcom/Shutterstock

By Ross MacKenzie; Benjamin Hawkins, London School of Hygiene&Tropical Medicine, and Thomas Novotny, San Diego State University

Jimi Hendrix is a member of the so-called 27 Club. A very exclusive club, as it turns out. EPA/Eduardo Miranda

By Dianna Kenny, University of Sydney

I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member. – Groucho Marx

Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to … – Kurt Cobain’s mother upon hearing of the death of her son

What do Otis Redding, Gram Parsons, Nick Drake, Jimmy McCulloch, James Ramey (aka Baby Huey), Bryan Osper, and Jon Guthrie have in common?

New artificial intelligence software uses photos to locate documents on the Internet with far greater accuracy than ever before, showing for the first time that a machine learning algorithm for image recognition and retrieval is accurate and efficient enough to improve large-scale document searches online.

The system uses pixel data in images and potentially video - rather than just text -- to locate documents. It learns to recognize the pixels associated with a search phrase by studying the results from text-based image search engines. The knowledge gleaned from those results can then be applied to other photos without tags or captions, making for more accurate document search results. 

Vehicle fatalities are the most common cause of accidental death around the world. In the US alone, there are 30,000 deaths in car crashes each year. 

Are there inequalities in those figures? According to an epidemiology paper presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in New Orleans, there are.

Uzay Kirbiyik, doctoral student in epidemiology at Indiana University, examined risk factors associated with drivers' survival in head-on vehicle collisions by examining Fatality Analysis Reporting System database records in 1,108 crashes.

Imagine we gave you three letters, say G, C and D. Then we gave you a name to associate to some combination of those three letters. How many could you recall on command?

Guitarists in cover bands do that all of the time. They can play thousands of songs from memory, and it's not uncommon in most musicians. There have been numerous studies regarding music and memory and a peek inside the brains of professional musicians adds to that.