By Rob Brooks, UNSW Australia.

Settle in for a long read. Over the coming weeks you will be bombarded by shorter, snappier pieces about a controversy inflaming the front where evolutionary and social psychology meet. I’ve touched on this controversy already, and promised you more. Here’s that more, in 2,300 words of detail … rather too long for a column, I know.

Still with me? Thanks.

Statistics - learning from data and of measuring, controlling and communicating uncertainty - has become important to science and it is vital to the future of science, Science 2.0.

Over the last 200 years, and certainly with the advent of large-scale computing in the last 30 years, statistics has been an essential part of the social, natural, biomedical and physical sciences, along with engineering; and business analytics.

Statistics helps quantify the reliability, reproducibility and general uncertainty associated with discoveries, because one can easily be fooled by complicated biases and patterns arising by chance.

After the last wave of 'American children don't perform well on international standardized tests' articles in news media, the Obama administration gutted No Child Left Behind, the program approved with overwhelming bipartisan over a decade earlier, and replaced it with Common Core standards. American teachers, who didn't like the feeling that they were having to 'teach to the test' in order for students to do as well on standardized tests as kids from countries who primarily teach to the test, have now been handed an entirely new and even more restrictive set of demands to teach to the test.

A protest against the killing of journalists by the Islamic State. Credit: Mast Irham/EPA

By Kevin McDonald, Middlesex University

America is a liberal democracy. 

Given the modern colloquial connotation of 'liberal' and its undertones of social authoritarianism, calling the United States a liberal democracy will make conservatives bristle, but it's true, and it is part of the reason they then say America is the greatest country in the world, or at least was until January of 2009. Ironically, conservatives, even those living in a liberal democracy, are happier than liberals pretty much...anywhere. 

An analysis of 16 Western European countries found that liberals are less happy overall, while conservatives tend to be more cheery, say psychologists. 

Generic drugs and biosimilar drugs are conceptually equivalent, though a biosimilar drug is not a generic drug.

Generics drugs are equivalent copycats - exact copies of molecules that were developed at great cost by companies that are now outside the patent window. Biosimilars are instead copies of molecules of a protein nature involving biological processes and materials, like cell culture or the extraction of products using living organisms, which is why there is no product that is exactly the same as the other. Basically, that is why the name 'biosimilar' exists, because unlike generics they are not 'bioequivalent' to the drugs that have survived rigorous testing and approval. 

Treatment with xenon gas reduces the extent of brain damage after a head injury reduces the extent of brain damage, according to a new study.

Head injury is the leading cause of death and disability in people under 45 in developed countries - due primarily to falls and road accidents. The primary injury caused by the initial mechanical force is followed by a secondary injury which develops in the hours and days afterwards. This secondary injury is largely responsible for patients' mental and physical disabilities, but there are currently no drug treatments that can be given after the accident to stop it from occurring.

Tiny single-cell organisms living underground could help with the problem of nuclear waste disposal, according to a paper in the ISME (Multidisciplinary Journal of Microbial Ecology) Journal.
  This is good news for Americans, since the Obama administration has lost the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository application even more often than the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has lost the emails showing they targeted political opponents.

Bacteria with waste-eating properties have been discovered before, but in relatively pristine soils. This is the first time finding microbes that can survive in the very harsh conditions expected in radioactive waste disposal sites.

Reducing hyperactivity in kids may be as simple as getting them out to play.

Kids are full of energy so having them trapped in a classroom all day from a young age isn't easy. For some, it is bordering on impossible and many of those have been saddled with the  Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) label. Rather than putting kids on expensive - and in the case of Ritalin, dangerous - medications, the solution may be as simple as some play time before school starts.

By pairing two unconventional forms of carbon – one shaped like a soccer ball, the other a tiny diamond – scientists have created a molecule that acts as a rectifier - it conducts electricity in only one direction, which means it could be possible to cheaply shrink computer chip components down to the size of molecules.