It all started back in the olden-days of mid-2007 with GalaxyZoo: the ultimate in online, interactive citizen science where anyone with eyes, an Internet connection, patience, and an appreciation for beautiful galactic images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey could make a reasonably important contribution to astrophysical scientific research.

Wrestlers are taught to ignore an opponent's eyes and instead watch his waist - nothing much is happening that his waist won't be involved in whereas eyes can be misleading.    That means wrestlers are conservatives, according to new research coming out in Attention, Perception&Psychophysics.

Progressives follow eye movements more than conservatives, the authors contend.   That means that progressives (also, liberals, if you don't know what the word liberal means) and conservatives quite literally do not see the world in the same way.   The researchers measured reaction to 'gaze cues' - the tendency to shift attention based on another person's eye movements.  Essentially, they wanted to find out who looked more at what distracted someone else.

Scientists writing in Nature Genetics have produced the full genome of a wild strawberry plant. 

The woodland strawberry - Fragaria vesca - is closely related to garden-variety cultivated strawberry and this berry contains large amounts of anti-oxidants (mainly tannins, the substances that give wine their astringency), as well as vitamins A, C and B12 and minerals – potassium, calcium and magnesium. In addition, the strawberry fruit is rich in substances for flavor and aroma.

The production of high quality chocolate will benefit from the recent sequencing and assembly of the chocolate tree genome - Theobroma cacao - considered by chocolate experts to produce the world's finest chocolate. The Maya domesticated this variety of Theobroma cacao, 'Criollo', about 3,000 years ago in Central America and it is among the oldest domesticated tree crops, though today many growers prefer to grow hybrid cacao trees ('Trinitario') that produce chocolate of lower quality but are more resistant to disease.

The old discussion about how an airplane, that is many tons of steel, can keep staying supported in mere air, is a perfect example for how discussions way too often polarize into two camps with both sides being wrong. Little headway is possible once any attempt at resolution is portrayed as either a dangerous accommodating that leads onto a slippery slope toward defeat, or worse belonging to the other, the evil side. There are too many such issues, not only in politics or largely yet to be explored scientific fields like climatology. Even in known physics, for instance in special relativity, there are these polarized debates where both sides are wrong. The theories are well known and their domains of applicability are well delimited by both mathematics and experiment.