It's not easy to blame childhood obesity on sunsets but scholars at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Bristol say that later daylight couldn't hurt - and they even defend daylight savings time, which most people can't find much good to say about.

The scholars analyzed the lifestyles of over 23,000 children aged 5-16 years in nine countries; England, Australia, USA, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Switzerland, Brazil and Madeira and Portugal. They looked for associations between the time of sunset and physical activity levels, measured via waist-worn accelerometers; electronic devices that measure body movement.

In the United States, professional basketball, the NBA, opens its regular season tonight. That means at this time tomorrow there will be talk that some player 'flopped' - fell on the ground to draw a foul and get a chance at a free basket.

A new analysis has found that two-thirds of the falls examined by the group at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev were found to be intentional.  And it happens a lot.

It happens so much because there is insufficient punishment for deception and teams are not doing the math. A cost/benefit analysis of "flopping" finds that 90 percent of the time no penalty is awarded, so as a strategy it is pointless.

By Michal Schwartz, Weizmann Institute of Science; Aleksandra Deczkowska, Weizmann Institute of Science, and Kuti Baruch, Weizmann Institute of Science

Men who have had sex with more than 20 women have a 28% lower risk of getting prostate cancer than those who have had only one partner  - but males having more than 20 male partners face a 100% higher risk of getting prostate cancer than those who have never slept with a man. 

The results were obtained as part of the Montreal study PROtEuS (Prostate Cancer&Environment Study), in which 3,208 men responded to a questionnaire on, amongst other things, their sex lives. Of these men, 1,590 were diagnosed with prostate cancer between September 2005 and August 2009, while 1,618 men were part of the control group.

Risk Associated with Number of Partners

As the death toll of Ebola continues to rise, especially in the hard-hit West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, the need for a viable cure is growing more and more urgent. Even more concerning is the possibility that once approved, vaccines may not be widely available for several months.

As often happens in times of medical crises, fringe groups come out from hiding–in this instance, organic activists in the form of the most high profile organic lobby group in the United States.

By Lydia Le Page, University of Edinburgh

The 3rd annual John Maddox Prize has been awarded to Emily Willingham, a science writer in the US, and David Robert Grimes, a physicist at the University of Oxford, in recognition of their work in the face of public hostility.

By Richard Kock, Royal Veterinary College

The still growing Ebola virus outbreak not only highlights the tragedy enveloping the areas most affected but also offers a commentary on they way in which the political ecology in West Africa allowed this disease to become established.

The social sciences have simultaneously become increasingly specialized and over-lapping. A new field calls itself Continental Shelf Prehistoric Research and it studies the remains of prehistoric human settlements which are now submerged beneath coastal waters.

Some of the now-drowned sites are tens of thousands of years old, requiring archaeologists to get help from oceanography and the geosciences. A recent paper describes how during the successive ice ages of the last million years, the sea level dropped at times by up to 120 meters and the exposed area of the continental shelf added 40% to the land area of Europe; a terrain occupied by vegetation, fauna, and people.

By Baden Eunson, Monash University

Recently, the Danish Toymaker Lego announced its plans for a reality TV show to be launched in 2015, rumored to be based on the idea of Master Builders, the top “construction workers” in the insanely successful Lego Movie earlier this year.

Economics is a dwindling field. Long called the 'dismal science' it is now considered just another philosophical school of thought; people in the money business who want quantification hire physicists rather than economists.

And the lack of female interest in the field shows it is no longer in vogue. A new analysis finds that women make up 57 percent of undergraduate classes at UK universities but only 27 percent of economics students. The women who like math are doing something else with it. 1.2 percent of females apply to study economics while 3.8 percent of boys do.