Northern Ireland recently changed the law to criminalize the act of paying for sex. This follows a trend set in Sweden, where selling sex is legal but buying it is criminalized.

I’m on the back seat of the lower deck of a number 37 bus, outside the red-brick and Portland stone clock tower of Lambeth Town Hall in Brixton, south London.  Although I know exactly where I am, I feel lost. I no longer know whether to trust what my eyes are telling me.

I’ve just been told by a leading vision scientist that I have no real depth perception. 

In other words, I have never seen in three dimensions the way most people do.

Lisa Marie Potter, Inside Science - Thank goodness for autostabilization, the digital camera feature that compensates for movement to achieve that crystal-clear, spontaneous selfie.

Jurassic World brings to life the fantasy of an amusement park where genetically engineered dinosaurs are the main attraction, as first imagined in the original book, then movie Jurassic Park back in 1993. This fourth movie in the franchise, in cinemas from today, is certainly action-packed, although there are a number of opportunities missed when it comes to how these beasts are represented.

A new psoriasis drug, ixekizumab , has resulted in 40 percent of people showing a complete clearance of psoriatic plaques after 12 weeks of treatment and over 90 percent showing improvement.

A psychologist and an English professor have written a review of studies and concluded that pigs perform as well as or better than dogs on some tests of behavioral and cognitive sophistication, and they compare favorably to chimpanzees.

The review by Emory psychologist Dr. Lori Marino and visiting English Professor Christina M. Colvin, seeks to extrapolate results to deduce what we do and do not know about pigs. The areas they discuss include cognition, emotion, self-awareness, personality and social complexity.

They conclude that “pigs possess complex ethological traits similar … to dogs and chimpanzees.” For example, pigs:

The World Health Organization released its 2015 updated essential medicines list and for the first time included the progesterone contraceptive vaginal ring (CVR), a contraceptive safe and effective for lactating women in the postpartum period.

The progesterone CVR, developed by the Population Council, is an intravaginal ring that provides women who breastfeed at least four times a day with a contraceptive option as early as four weeks after giving birth. It can be used for up to a year for improved birth spacing.

Comparing the genomes of different species — or different members of the same species — is the basis of a great deal of modern biology because DNA sequences conserved across species are likely to be functionally important, while variations between members of the same species can indicate different susceptibilities to disease.

The central United States has undergone a dramatic increase in seismicity over the past 6 years. From 1973-2008, there was an average of 24 earthquakes of magnitude 3 and larger per year. From 2009-2014, the rate steadily increased, averaging 193 per year and peaking in 2014 with 688 earthquakes. So far in 2015, there have been 430 earthquakes of that size in the central U.S. region through the end of May.

There are many questions and misconceptions about what’s happening. How does the observed increase relate to oil and gas production activities? Does this connect to fracking—more formally known as hydraulic fracturing? What exactly is fracking? What are induced earthquakes?

The Natural Resources Defense Council environmental lobbying group has created a coalition and they have drafted a petition demanding that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ban eight food additives they believe are carcinogens, in the interests of public health.

The problem is that many of these are natural, which is one reason why they have never been banned. The other reason is they haven't been shown to be harmful, regardless of whether or not we have been trained by environmental lobbying groups to be scared of chemical names.