Oh, for those days of 2007, when the miracle vegetable story of the week - maybe the year - was instead about the super powers of chocolate.

The science underpinning those claims was sparse but the usually-reputable AAAS even had an entire panel on it at its annual meeting, populated by only one researcher who was not funded by the Mars chocolate empire.

The more conservative a female House of Representatives lawmaker is, the more likely she is to look like a woman, according to a UCLA analysis.

Heteronormative gender bias, right? Stupid GOP likes 1950s stereotypes.

Maybe. The GOP wears ties too, and it's hard to know if President Obama even owns one. The UCLA psychologists were somewhat sure they could tell a book by its cover, and so they did.  They also found the opposite to be true: Female politicians with less feminine facial features were more likely to be Democrats, and the more liberal their voting record, the more mannish they looked.

UPDATE: what a difference a small typo makes! In the report below I claimed that the CDF top mass measurement was yet to be stripped of the record of being the most precise in the world, given that the total uncertainty on the mass was 1.01 GeV, while the newest CMS result has a total error of 1.07 GeV... I however realized this morning that the total CDF uncertainty of the quoted measurement is 1.10, not 1.01 ! So the CMS result mentioned at the bottom of this article is indeed the most precise single measurement in the world of the top quark mass !

--

Children's television is 'problematic', according to a new paper in the Journal of Communication.

While there is no physical bullying in these shows, what the authors consider an 'alarming' amount contain behaviors like cruel gossiping and manipulation of friendship.  There aren't many ways for shows to be funny in 2012, it seems.

Here is a head scratcher; when confronted about the vague, conflicting language in Proposition 37 - even the real name, the California Right to Know Genetically Modified Food Act, is weird and disjointed - Attorney James Wheaton, who made his fortune in nuisance lawsuits under the Proposition 65 labeling act he championed, told the Sacramento Bee's Dan Moran he put so little thought into the verbage of Proposition 37 that he he hadn't given any thought to whether he might litigate over the new measure, if it passes.

It used to be you had to rely on human science journalists to get concepts properly framed for you and enjoy the shot of dopamine confirmation bias provides.  It still happens, just a lot less. Popular Science just went on an anti-religion rant - and you know it is bad when your own subscribers ask you to stop trolling them - and Scientific American has long been basically an unregistered PAC. But people are jaded by that approach and it is a big part of the reason why science has basically disappeared from mainstream media companies even though the science audience has grown substantially. 

What to give the person who has everything? A clock that will keep perfect time  even after the heat-death of the universe. 

Such a "space-time crystal" has periodic structure in time as well as space. Why haven't we built those? With such a 4D crystal, scientists would have a new and more effective means by which to study how complex physical properties and behaviors emerge from the collective interactions of large numbers of individual particles, the so-called many-body problem of physics. A space-time crystal could also be used to study phenomena in the quantum world, such as entanglement, in which an action on one particle impacts another particle even if the two particles are separated by vast distances.

The muscle-building dietary supplement creatine helps women battling depressions, according to a study from South Korea and the University of Utah. It reports that women with major depressive disorder (MDD) who augmented their daily antidepressant with 5 grams of creatine responded twice as fast and experienced remission of the illness at twice the rate of women who took the antidepressant alone.

Sharpless 2-292, a stellar nursery called the Seagull Nebula because it seems to form the head of the seagull, glows brightly due to the energetic radiation from a very hot young star lurking at its heart. Now it has gotten a new look courtesy of the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at La Silla Observatory.

The American College Of Obstetricians And Gynecologists (ACOG) has issued new guidelines to endorse IUDs and implants as first-line birth control options for teens. Despite widespread availability of condoms and birth control for women at very low cost (31-year-old Georgetown law students disagree, of course, they think the government should pay for it so they can instead spend $50,000 a year becoming lawyers), over 80 percent of teen pregnancies are unintended, they note, and so something more permanent should be used.