Since 1996, farmers across the world have planted more than a billion acres of genetically modified corn and cotton that produce insecticidal proteins from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, called Bt for short. 

Bt proteins, used for decades in sprays by organic farmers, kill some devastating pests but are environmentally friendly and harmless to people. Some scientists have feared that widespread use of these proteins in genetically modified crops would spur rapid evolution of resistance in pests, while opponents predicted Armageddon due to such a biological arms race.

Overprecision, excessive confidence in the accuracy of our knowledge, can have profound consequences in various ways, making people intolerant of dissenting views,  leading physicians to gravitate too quickly to a diagnosis or inflating investors' valuation of their investments.

Overprecision is a common form of overconfidence driven, at least in part, by excessive certainty in the accuracy of our judgments, say business scholars.

A new paper in Psychological Science says that the more confident participants were about their estimates of an uncertain quantity, the less they adjusted their estimates in response to feedback about their accuracy and to the costs of being wrong.

For a human, knowing the difference between the "charge" of a battery and being charged in a crime is easy. Any three-year-old can look at a cartoon of a chicken and say "That's a chicken" but for computers those are still daunting tasks.

When a liver from a deceased adult or adolescent donor is split into two separate portions for transplantation, with the smaller portion going to a young child and the larger to an adult, the child will benefit as much if they had received a whole organ from a donor close to their size, according to a paper in Liver Transplantation.      

The Sea of Galilee, located in the North of Israel, has numerous significant archaeological sites and an ancient structure underneath the waves adds to its mysteries.

The cone-shaped monument, approximately 230 feet in diameter, 39 feet high, and weighing an estimated 60,000 tons, was found while conducting a geophysical survey on the southern Sea of Galilee, reports Prof. Shmulik Marco of TAU's Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences. 

While the universe is littered with planets, comets and lots of other rocky bodies, how tiny grains of dust in the disc around a young star grow bigger and bigger, to eventually become rubble and even boulders well beyond a meter in size, is a mystery.

Computer models suggest that dust grains grow when they collide and stick together. However, when these bigger grains collide again at high speed they are often smashed to pieces and sent back to square one. Even when this does not happen, the models show that the larger grains would quickly move inwards because of friction between the dust and gas and fall onto their parent star, leaving no chance that they could grow even further.

I’ve already mentioned the nonsensical paper “published” in (surprise, surprise) arXiv in which the authors claim that the origin of life occurred long before the origin of the Earth based on the application of Moore’s Law to DNA.

I won’t go into all the reasons that this is silly — for that, you can see critiques by PZ Myers and Massimo Pigliucci. Suffice it to say that the data, the analysis, and the interpretation are all problematic.

Edward Joseph Snowden, a 29 year-old systems administrator, the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations and already called biggest scandal of them all, wants transparency; so might I. But is transparency even possible, and what does transparency entail?