77% of Americans prefer summer over winter and while we know what temperatures actually were this past winter, what people think they were in a recent Harris Poll is something else.

When it came to the temperature, 88 percent of Midwesterners and 84 percent of Easterners say it was colder than normal. 71 percent believe it was while only 18 percent felt it was colder than normal. 45% in the West believe it was warmer than normal.

When it came to precipitation, 77 percent of those in the Midwest, 73 percent in the East and 49 percent say there was more rain or snow in their area. In the West, 62% say they had less rain or snow this winter.

Was the snow due to climate change?

Dr. Bruna Bezerra from the University of Bristol and colleagues have captured video of a wild male marmoset embracing and caring for his dying partner after she accidentally fell from a tree in the Atlantic Forest in the Northeast of Brazil, the first time that compassionate care-taking behavior towards a dying adult group member has been observed in monkeys.

Previously, such behavior was believed to be unique to humans and chimpanzees.

Manure from dairy cows, which is commonly used as a farm soil fertilizer, contains a surprising number of newly identified antibiotic resistance genes from the cows' gut bacteria. The findings, reported in mBio® the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, hints that cow manure is a potential source of new types of antibiotic resistance genes that transfer to bacteria in the soils where food is grown.

Thousands of antibiotic resistance (AR) genes have already been identified, but the vast majority of them don't pose a problem when found in harmless bacteria. The real worry is when these genes appear in the types of pathogenic bacteria that cause food-borne illnesses or hospital infections.

2,234 adults surveyed online between March 12 and 17, 2014 by The Harris Poll reveal that people are concerned about the environment - but may not be doing much about it.

And over 80 percent avoid labels like “green”, “conservationist” and “environmentalist”, which shows that environmental corporations have lost a lot of credibility among the public. 

However, parents with younger kids are more concerned than childless people, though they are only slightly more likely to tell others to be more environmentally responsible. Women are more likely to indicate encouraging others to be more environmentally-friendly. 25% more women than men claim they are making more effort to be environmentally-conscious than they did a year ago.

We are all familiar with the Mafia. In China, it is the Triads, in Italy it is La Cosa Nostra. You pay for protection or disaster is sure to befall you.

It happens in the bird world too, according to a new report. A bird will lay an egg in your home and you will raise the hatchling or pay the price. Throw the little parasite out and an accident will befall your nest.

It is a child-rearing strategy, but is it an effective one? Evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi postulated the mafia hypothesis back in 1979 and it has been contentious ever since. Critics argue that the retaliation gives the parasites no advantage, carrying high costs instead.

Evolutionary biologists created a mathematical model to find out. 

For the first time, researchers have studied the Black Death bacterium's entire family tree to fully understand how some of the family members evolve to become harmful. Contrary to popular belief, pathogenic members of this bacterial family do not share a recent common disease-causing ancestor, but instead, have followed parallel evolutionary paths to become harmful.

Think global warming might change things a little? You haven't seen anything compared to 50 million years ago.

Though Antarctica is year-round one of the coldest places on Earth, and the continent's interior is the coldest place, with annual average land temperatures far below zero degrees Fahrenheit, during the Eocene epoch, 40-50 million years ago, there was a period with high concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and consequently a greenhouse climate.  

What looked at first like a sort of upside-down planet in
the binary star system KOI-3278
has instead revealed a new method for studying binary star systems, according to a University of Washington team who writes of the first "self-lensing" binary star system — one in which the mass of the closer star can be measured by how powerfully it magnifies light from its more distant companion star.

Our sun stands alone but about 40 percent of similar stars are in binary (two-star) or multi-star systems, orbiting their companions in a gravitational dance.

The latest fad in implied health benefits that can slip under the regulatory radar are edible flowers from China. 

Why implied? Because they are rich in phenolics and have good antioxidant capacity.  What will that do? No one knows. Antioxidants haven't been shown to help anyone at all and phenolics claims were how the rationalization that organic food was healthier arose - and then debunked. To maintain a level of credibility the key phrase "may be partly responsible" is liberally applied.

Some edible flowers, which have been used as ingredients, seasoning and garnish in Chinese food for centuries, contain phenolics that 

The confirmation of the Higgs boson and what it can tell us about the origins of mass is getting all of the attention but there are scientific mysteries about less-understood forces that may also be keys to figuring out natural laws.

Among these is quantum turbulence, the chaotic motion - at very high rates - of fluids that exist at temperatures close to zero. Observers as far back as Leonardo da Vinci have studied turbulence, a complex state of fluid motion. He observed that water falling into a pond creates eddies of motion, thus realizing that the motion of water shaped the landscape.