The scientists behind the BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) telescope, last year made an extraordinary claim that they had detected gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time. Initially hailed as the most groundbreaking discovery of the century, it later proved a false alarm: the signal was merely galactic dust.

So are we likely to ever find gravitational waves? And would they really provide irrefutable evidence for the Big Bang? Here are five common myths and misconceptions about gravitational waves.

We want drugs to get better and we don’t want them to be just for the rich. Health care, in much of modern America, has become a right rather than a luxury so a country that is fine with overpaying for a phone is less inclined to have gaps in health care quality.

People want Apple and Samsung to make money so the companies are motivated to create the next great phone. If Apple is the most highly-valued company in the U.S., they earned it and if you want their new iPhone 6s first, you pay the price, even if the new features are negligible.

The existence of parallel universes may seem like something cooked up by science fiction writers, with little relevance to modern theoretical physics.

But the idea that we live in a “multiverse” made up of an infinite number of parallel universes has long been considered a scientific possibility – although it is still a matter of vigorous debate among physicists. The race is now on to find a way to test the theory, including searching the sky for signs of collisions with other universes.

The realization that everything would be okay regarding the obesity epidemic occurred to me in a doughnut shop. It was the last week of my employment as a weight loss doctor and for years, my clinic had been a junk food free zone. This was not because I set rules based on a notion that junk food is bad for a person. I didn't and I don't really have much worry about sugary snacks. It just happened as a sort of accidental byproduct of what we were doing. If you talk about diet rules all day and see how hard the patients are working to eat better, it just feels wrong to have a big box of doughnuts in the break-room...or powdered sugar on your slacks.

Since the 1980s, flagship comic-book superhero movie franchises – from DC’s Superman to Marvel’s Iron Man – have seen some major movie studio investments and, more often than not, blockbuster returns.

But significant changes in the superhero mythos in our culture indicate that their future seems bleak.

Universal Studios leads the year’s movie profits without a single superhero movie. Meanwhile, the latest Fantastic Four reboot has failed terribly.

The title of this post is also the title of a self-published book by George Triantaphyllou, a greek physicist whom I met two weeks ago in Kolimbari, when we attended the ICNFP 2015 conference. I had met George at the same conference three years before, and this year we had some time to chat during a nice excursion in a botanical garden near Chania and at the conference dinner. As he was kind enough to offer me a copy of his book, I thought I would relate about it here today.

Examination of fossil fragments from Panama has led Smithsonian scientists and colleagues to the discovery of a new genus and species of river dolphin that has been long extinct. The team named it Isthminia panamensis. The specimen not only revealed a new species to science, but also shed new light onto the evolution of today's freshwater river dolphin species.

I’ll be honest, I like Equal. If I had my way, my morning would consist of a kiss from my wife and a cup of Double Black Diamond Extra Bold coffee with a packet of Equal and a little bit of French Vanilla creamer thrown in. Super bold coffee with sweetness added? I like contrasts.

What’s even more of a contrast, and more confusing to people who know me, is that someone who won’t eat store-bought jelly - doesn't even want it in the house - someone who would, given his way, never let his family eat anything that wasn’t grown, killed, processed and cooked by anyone but him, would consume an “artificial” sweetener at all.

Despite billions of dollars in outreach programs designed to lure women into computer programming, and companies mandating that more women be hired, most females would rather go into something involving people.

Yet a new survey of 270 high school students concludes that three times as many girls would interested in enrolling in a computer science class if the classroom was redesigned to be less "geeky" and more inviting.

So we can knock Barbie dolls and pink clothes, but they are appealing to the market that is rather than the market some academics would like it to be. The notion that women and men are the same has become passe.

Diets rich in fish oil versus diets rich in lard produce very different bacteria in the guts of mice, reports a study from Sahlgrenska Academy published in Cell Metabolism.

The researchers transferred these microbes into other mice to see how they affected health. The results suggest that gut bacteria share some of the responsibility for the beneficial effects of fish oil and the harmful effects of lard.