The increasing use of chemical herbicides, both synthetic and organic kinds, is often blamed for the declining plant biodiversity in farms, but it is simplistic to think herbicide exposure is solely to blame.

The science doesn't add up. If herbicides are a key factor in declining diversity, then thriving species would be more tolerant to widely used herbicides than rare or declining species, according to J. Franklin Egan, research ecologist, USDA-Agricultural Research Service. But that isn't the case.

Almost one-third of US adolescents consume high-caffeine energy drinks and the teens who do also report higher rates of alcohol, cigarette, or drug use, according to a paper in the Journal of Addiction Medicine.

The same characteristics that attract young people to consume energy drinks—such as being "sensation-seeking or risk-oriented" — may make them more likely to use other substances as well, suggests the new paper by Yvonne M. Terry-McElrath, MSA, and colleagues of the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 

For decades, scientists have been pushing toward the goal of creating artificial building blocks that can self-assemble in large numbers and reassemble to take on new tasks or to remedy defects. Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark have taken a step toward that.

"The potential of such new man-made systems is almost limitless, and many expect these novel materials to become the foundation of future technologies," says Dr. Maik Hadorn from Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Zürich. "We used short DNA strands as smart glue to link preliminary stages of artificial cells (called artificial vesicles) to engineer novel tissue-like structures."

Do you prize your self on individual initiative or do you feel like the events in your life are outside your control and you just have to react? Do you think there needs to be more rules and regulations to manage things for you, or would you rather make it on your own?

An article in Health Psychology finds that how you view your life can affect your risk of mortality; people who believe they can achieve goals despite hardships are more likely to live longer and healthier lives, especially among those with less education.

If you want to get quality research, you want the best researchers, right?

Not necessarily. An advanced trend in science academia is social engineering, and that means building a team that isn't simply the best minds, but has a diverse mix of ethnicity and gender and culture that can also communicate well, are socially sensitive and emotionally engaged with each other. 

Good luck quantifying how "emotionally engaged" you are at review time.

Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) use auditory or tactile stimulation to provide representations of visual information and can help the blind "see" colors and shapes.

Users recognize the image without seeing it because the information is transformed into audio or touch signals. But few people in the blind community actually use them because they are cumbersome and unpleasant to use.

Kepler-413b is located 2,300 light-years (about 700 parsecs) away in the constellation Cygnus. It circles a close pair of orange and red dwarf stars every 66 days but what really makes Kepler-413b unusual is that it precesses wildly on its spin axis - The tilt of the spin axis of the planet can vary by as much as 30 degrees over 11 years with respect to the plane of the binary star's orbit.

Compare that to the Earth's rotational precession, which is a far more modest 23.5 degrees over 26,000 years. This far-off planet is far-out and all of this complex movement leads to rapid and erratic changes in seasons.  That it is precessing on a human timescale is simply amazing. 

It's counterintuitive but psychologists say we tend to remember unattractive faces more likely than attractive ones - attractive faces leave much less distinctive impressions on our memory unless they have particularly remarkable features.

Population health has a lot of different factors - and infant mortality is one of them but it doesn't tell the entire story. Some in America laud Cuban health care, for example, but Cuba just had a cholera epidemic, something that doesn't happen in the United States.

And Cubans abort babies if there are signs of trouble, as do many industrialized nations, while America does not. Trying to save more babies is one reason why America ranks 27th among industrialized nations in infant mortality, and if you are in the business of criticizing American health care, you can stop thinking critically right there. 

Estimates say there are over 3,000,000 registered freelancers worldwide, competing for everything from computer programming and web design to finance and engineering.

How can you make yourself more attractive to potential employers?