If there is reason for hope that coronavirus fears may mean pro-science beliefs get back to being the norm in modern culture, it is that regular chemicals have disappeared from store shelves in San Francisco while they clamor for vaccines they used to distrust. Meanwhile, there are plenty of organic alternatives and vegan food to be found.

If there is reason for despair it's that 64 percent of British millennials believe the moon landing was fake. Distrust of reality is so endemic that 11 percent of millennials in the country think Tupac Shakur faked his own death and is living in hiding somewhere.

Smoking is in decline to such an extent that there is no longer fear about creating Prohibition-style casual criminals with totalitarian rules or outright bans, so the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is doing the next best thing; mandating graphic warnings on packages.

Stegosaurs are among the most recognizable dinosaurs because they left a lasting impression, including on a Scottish island.

Analysis of footprints show stegosaur roamed the Isle of Skye about 170 million years ago. it wasn't an isle then, it was a long-lost island in the Atlantic, and the site on the north-east coast was at the time a mudflat on the edge of a shallow lagoon. It contains a mixture of footprints, which means dinosaurs on Skye were more diverse than known. 

In Ukraine and the west Russian Plain, there remain mysterious bone circles made from the remains of dozens of mammoths long ago. 

About 70 of them are known to exist. One, outside the modern village of Kostenki 250 miles south of Moscow, has been dated to 20,000 years in the past, making it the oldest such circular structure built by humans. A total of 51 lower jaws and 64 individual mammoth skulls were used to construct the walls of the 30 foot by 30 foot structure, now called Kostenki 11, and scattered across its interior. The bones were likely sourced from animal graveyards, and the circle was then hidden by sediment and is now a foot below current surface level.

Here is Dr Tedros demonstrating how to wash your hands for COVID-19 protection in the "Safe Hands" challenge

(click to watch on Youtube)

He is challenging others to do the same and upload videos of themselves doing it.

Though implicit bias - the belief that you are prejudiced, it's just a matter of degree - is controversial, that's only because it lacks scientific footing. A new study seeks to advance that.

We all have likes and dislikes but when it becomes bias or prejudice is subjective. If you prefer dark haired men, does that mean you are prejudiced against redheads? It does, in things like the Implicit Association Test. 

Conspiracy theories have a long history, but the actual term “conspiracy theory” emerged much more recently. It was only a few decades ago that the term took on the derogatory connotations it has today, where to call someone a conspiracy theorist functions as an insult.

So it may come as no surprise that there is even a conspiracy theory about the origins of the label. This conspiracy theory claims that the CIA invented the term in 1967 to disqualify those who questioned the official version of John F Kennedy’s assassination and doubted that his killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had acted alone.

Drosophila flies lose long-term memory of a traumatic event when kept in the dark, and the authors of a new study link that to a specific molecular mechanism responsible. 

Memories are difficult to erase but breakthroughs could be important for sufferers of trauma, because while most normal events won't be recalled even the same day, a particularly shocking event may be consolidated into our long-term memory, whereby new proteins are synthesized and the neuronal circuits in our brain are modified.

With coronavirus all over media and politicians looking for ways to leverage concern into votes for their political party this November, a number of parents will want to take their children to a doctor at the first sign of a cough "just to be sure" and doctors say that's a bad idea. It burdens a health system that could be overtaxed if aggressive projections about the impact of COVID-19 come true.

Those parents are not being rational, doctors will note, most kids will not be harmed by it any more than they would a bad cold or flu, and yet the American medical system is overrun by "defensive medicine" that engages in the same behavior.

A rock carving found in the Teymareh rock art site in Khomein county in Central Iran is part man and part mantis, with six limbs.  Was it a mistake? The world's first graphic novel? A way to inspire warriors to fight their foes? We may never know. It's hard to even know its age.

Rock carvings - petroglyphs - of invertebrate animals are rare, so for a new paper  entomologists teamed up with archaeologists to try and identify the motif. They compared the carving with others around the world and with the local six-legged creatures which its prehistoric artists could have encountered.