Though drinking alcohol while pregnant is considered a cultural no-no in the United States, that is not the case for other current and former British subjects. 

Data of almost 18,000 women in the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand finds that 20% all the way up to almost 80% of those questioned drank during pregnancy, and across all social strata.
The prevalence of drinking alcohol ranged from 20% to 80% in Ireland, and from 40% to 80% in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

Women who smoked were more likely to drink alcohol as well.

We’ve long attempted to recreate living creatures in robot form.

From very early age of robotics, there has been attempts to reproduce systems similar to human arms and hands.

This has been extended to flexible and mobile platforms reproducing different animals from dogs to snakes to climbing spider octopods, and even entire humanoids.

The Tour de France has been rolling for more than a week now and has finally made it to France in a brutal few days that has seen 220 kilometer stages, major crashes, cobbles, steep ramps and broken bones for two race leaders. But perhaps the biggest challenge lies just around the corner in an intriguing Stage 9, where the riders have to cover what looks like a trifling 28 km.

We have known for some time the people suffering from schizophrenia and other psychoses smoke more than the general population.

Donuts, electric current and quantum physics - if you are a theoretical physicist interested in topological insulators, materials whose ability to conduct electric current originates in their topology, it makes perfect sense.

The easiest way to understand what "topological" means in this context is to imagine how a donut can be turned into a coffee cup by pulling, stretching and moulding - but without cutting it.

Topologically speaking, therefore, doughnuts and coffee cups are identical, and by applying the same principle to the quantum mechanical wave function of electrons in a solid one obtains the phenomenon of the topological insulator. This is advanced quantum physics, highly complex and far removed from everyday experience. 

Working as an experimental particle physicist in a large scientific collaboration, such as the 3000-strong CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, is a (not too uncommon) privilege, for several reasons. 
One of those reasons is of purely numerical kind: the number of publications that bear your name grows by the day, and may reach four-figure values in the course of a couple of decades (I am about to cross that point with my publication list, in fact). But what value do those thousand articles have for the sake of assessing your value as a scientist ? Very little, indeed, and in fact all the selection to which I have participated in my career required one to specify one's specific contribution to all the papers one wished to boast about.

It must be nice to have a job with so much free time on your hands that you can do just about anything, regardless of merit, and not only get away with it, but, rather, be rewarded for it.

Our dear friends, the Environmental Working Group (EWG), perhaps the most scientifically flawed organization out there (and this is no small accomplishment) have decided to take on the (all of a sudden) life and death issue of children drawing with crayons.

Hope you were sitting down when you heard about this.

This non-issue arises from a report, entitled “EWG Tests Find Asbestos in Kids’ crayons, Crime Scene Kits— Even trace exposures to lethal asbestos fibers can cause cancer, other diseases.”

Any discussion of carbohydrates in the diet must deal with the Atkins conception of weight loss, because it is so commonly used and it rests in the middle of the debate about the causes of weight gain. Anyone trying to figure out why we've become obese needs to decide, at some point, whether Atkins had the cause and effect of obesity and diabetes correct.

It's easy to dismiss Dr. Atkins. His books are self-promoting (he named the diet, which pre-existed him by 150 years, after himself) and full of hyperbole:

Climate change models predict that sea temperatures will rise significantly, including in the tropics. In these areas, rainfall is also predicted to increase, reducing the salt concentration of the surface layer of the sea. Together, these changes would dramatically affect the microscopic communities of bacteria and plankton that inhabit the oceans, impacting species higher up the food chain. Worryingly, future conditions may favour disease-causing bacteria and plankton species which produce toxins, such as the lethal PST (paralytic shellfish toxin). These can accumulate in shellfish such as mussels and oysters, putting human consumers at risk.