Earlier this year, I visited the library at the Australian National University with my son so he could borrow some books for an essay on Chinese history. Wandering past shelf after shelf, he asked me, “How does it feel to be writing another book that no-one will read?”

It was just another teenage jibe, but in policy terms it was a prescient analysis.

In recent weeks there have been reports that the government is considering making publication output much less important in the formulae that allocate research funding to universities.

This week's graph is a reminder that particle physicists are, deep in their bones, bump hunters. Sure, some of my colleagues could best be described as detector builders; others as software wizards; still others as statistical gurus. But what excites us the most is to go hunting for a bump in a mass histogram. 

Men commit over 85% of all homicides, 91% of all same-sex homicides and 97% of all same-sex homicides in which the victim and killer aren’t related to each other.

These startling statistics are driven home with each new mass shooting (though the most recent tragedy in San Bernardino, California is a bit unusual in that a married couple were the shooters).

In any event, politicians and the media are trotting out the usual suspects to explain the tragedy, whether it’s the lack of attention paid to mental illness or the easy availability of guns.

With public demonstrations banned at the COP21 conference on climate change in Paris, climate activists are taking to social media to get out their message on climate justice.

Before the official summit kicked off, activists held more than 2,300 events in over 175 countries in a Global Climate March, rallying around the shared goal, “Keep fossil fuels in the ground and finance a just transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050.”

Global activism is impressive in scale, but are activists reaching people on social media who are not already supporters of action on climate change?

Do you get alarmed when you see magazine, blog or television claims promoting the idea that the chicken you buy from a competitor has added hormones or steroids? Like much of the marketing done by organic and natural food companies, and enabled by bullying tactics from dark-money funded lobbying groups like SourceWatch and Natural Resources Defense Council, it is a complete lie - but there is no recourse for suggesting that is the case as long as organic companies don't name a competitor specifically. It is legal to claim your product does not have something without mentioning that neither does anyone else.

Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
 aren't trying to commit a microaggression when they note it's been well established that men perform better than women on specific spatial tasks.

The issue is how much of that is linked to sex hormones versus cultural conditioning and other factors. To test that factor they administered testosterone to women and tested how they performed in wayfinding tasks in a virtual environment.

Using fMRI, the researchers saw that men in the study took several shortcuts, oriented themselves more using cardinal directions and used a different part of the brain than the women in the study.

Most people don't know this, but the cucumbers we buy in the supermarket are purely female - grown from plants which were carefully cross-bred to produce female-only flowers. But while farmers have long known that "femaleness" factors into agricultural success - the greater the percentage of female flowers, the greater the yield of both seeds and fruit - it is only recently that scientists have revealed the molecular basis of plant sex determination.

Researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), together with scientists from the universities of Stirling and Bristol (United Kingdom), have for the first time observed an increase in body temperature of between two and four degrees in zebrafish, when these are subjected to stressful situations. This phenomenon is known as emotional fever, as it is related to the emotions that animals feel in the face of an external stimulus and it has even been linked, not without some controversy, with their consciousness.

FORT PIERCE, FL - In citrus fruit, the color of the peel is a major factor in consumer selection; fresh oranges with a dark orange peel are favored. In order to appeal to consumer preferences, citrus that is picked when it hasn't reached peak color is often "degreened", and then may be treated with an emulsion containing Citrus Red No.2 (CR2) to improve peel color. A new study reveals three food grade colorants that are promising natural alternatives to CR2.

An international collaboration between scientists in Sweden, Russia, and the United States has resulted in the successful engineering of new diaphragm tissue in rats using a mixture of stem cells and a 3D scaffold. When transplanted, it has regrown with the same complex mechanical properties of diaphragm muscle. The study is published in the journal Biomaterials, and offers hope of a cure for a common birth defect and possible future heart muscle repairs.