Yesterday I visited the Liceo “Benedetti” of Venice, where 40 students are preparing their artwork for a project of communicating science with art that will culminate in an exhibit at the Palazzo del Casinò of the Lido of Venice, during the week of the EPS conference in July.

The National Commission on Forensic Science was dissolved by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a decisive action that brought an end to a highly decorated body of professionals, but one that was frequently stymied by legal gamesmanship and discord.  The commission, a precipitant of the Obama administration's criminal justice reform efforts, was curiously loaded with trial attorneys, law professors, and other academicians but relatively few forensic scientists.

There has been some ongoing concern about bee colonies, even fears of an impending "colony collapse disorder", but both the fears and the causes have been misplaced, recent studies have shown.

Rather than being a mysterious effect due to pesticides (like neonicotinoids) slight variations in bee populations remain the fault of parasites. Yet that brings its own mystery. Varroa mites, the biggest culprit, are not very mobile. 

A little while ago I encountered an interesting problem, which I had fun solving by myself. I think my solution is not original (it must have occurred to others a gazillion times in the past) but I do believe the implementation is nice, so I want to share it with you here.
The general problem

Imagine you are given a set of counts distributed in bins of a histogram. This could be, for instance, the age distribution of a set of people. You are asked to assign uncertainty bars to the counts: in other words, estimate a "one-sigma" interval for the relative rate of counts in each bin.

When "Guardians of the Galaxy" was in development, I was skeptical. When I was a kid, they were simply different Avengers, in space. Seriously, they had a Major from America, an archer, a strong guy, etc. And everyone knows Marvel had sold off the movie rights to the popular characters to prevent bankruptcy so they had only B level characters left.

But one of those B-level characters was Iron Man, and Jon Favreau, Robert Downey, Jr. and a whole team of four writers (usually a bad sign) turned in arguably the best superhero movie of all (1). And it just so happened other B-level characters made up The Avengers, and a boom was born.

Atrial fibrillation and flutter (also known as AFF) is associated with serious health problems and is a significant contributor to death rates. Knowing that, why would there be different death rates for male and female patients who presented with AFF to emergency departments and then discharged? Even 30 and 90 days after discharge. 

AFF is an irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia) that is associated with blood clots to the brain (e.g., stroke) and other organs, heart failure, and sometimes death. It affects approximately 2.66 million Americans. 

Though men and women obviously differ, that has become muddled in the name of equality. Drug reactions are different, obviously one gender gives birth to children. 

A new study shows there are still many similarities, but also a whole lot of biological differences not in genes, but in gene expression. Their findings showed that harmful mutations in these particular genes tend to accumulate in the population in relatively high frequencies, and the study explains why. The detailed map of these genes provides evidence that males and females undergo a sort of separate, but interconnected, evolution.  

Prosthetics may look better but they have not really changed much in the last 100 years. That could soon change. The next generation of hand prosthetics may be far more like a real hand - they could allow the wearer to reach for objects almost automatically, without really thinking, like real hands do now.

Current prosthetic hands are controlled via myoelectric signals - that is electrical activity of the muscles recorded from the skin surface of the stump.In the US there are 500,000 upper limb amputees a year.

In the many efforts to prevent people from taking up smoking, most initiatives have focused on kids.  As the consumer advocacy group the American Council on Science and Health has long phrased it, "smoking is a pediatric disease." Prevent uptake in the young, and addiction rarely occurs.

But that has led to governments with a big blind spot about young adults, according to a paper in the Canadian Journal of Public Health by Thierry Gagné, a doctoral student at Université de Montréal's School of Public Health.

It’s widely understood that a key reason why life developed on Earth is because of water.  A common definition of a habitable environment is one in which plenty of liquid water is available to sustain life.  In short, we can’t live without water.