Mosquitoes rely on sense of smell to get what they need to survive. Females need blood to produce their eggs, so they find a host to bite and spots to lay eggs, while both males and females feed on nectar.

Their dominant source of food is nectar from flowers yet scientists know little about the scents that draw mosquitoes toward certain flowers, or repel them from others. Discovering this could help develop less toxic and better repellents, more effective traps, and lead to an understanding of how the mosquito brain responds to sensory information -- including the cues that, on occasion, lead a female mosquito to bite one of us.

In a new short paper in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, Roger A. Søraa from Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and co-authors Eduard Fosch-Villaronga from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and Adam Poulsen from Charles Sturt University in Australia discuss what a queering of robots might entail.

They point out that technology is not developed in a vacuum, but instead reflects biases and reproduces societal values and beliefs.

A primitive bee from 100 million years ago has two things in common with bees of today; pollen and a parasite that caused its demise, much like varroa mites cause periodic colony collapse disorder today.

The mid-Cretaceous fossil from Myanmar provides the first record of a primitive bee with pollen and also the first record of the beetle parasites, which continue to show up on modern bees today. Beetle parasites may have caused the flight error that was deadly for the insect. The Discoscapa apicula specimen became stuck in tree resin and thus preserved in amber, and has now been identified as a new family, genus and species. The new find has been classified as Discoscapa apicula, in the family Discoscapidae. 

An article in Manufacturing&Service Operations Management says that an increase in the number of stores directly decreases consumer waste. The reason is improved access to groceries which would men better distribution of inventory and price competition. 

Food waste is a big problem in all developed countries; Europe became a joke in the previous decade when they set out to ban sales of 'ugly' food. In the U.S., the Department of Agriculture estimates food waste at between 30-40 percent of the food supply.

Much has been made of Chinese student achievement test scores, but inconvenient confounders are often ignored, such as that Chinese learn by rote. No teach in America wants to do that. Teachers are poorly paid and clean their own toilets.

And only elite kids take the tests. The non-elites were overwhelmingly decimated by China's one-child policy, a totalitarian government mandate enacted in 1979 to reduce the population until agriculture could catch up. However, it closed the education gap, at least for those not born illegally. And for those women who weren't aborted by government decree. 

A new paper by epidemiologists in Europe will overturn centuries of diet and health thinking; the thinking that eating too much makes people gain weight.

Instead, the new statistical correlation argues, the weight gain is due to pregnant women who used cosmetics containing parabens, which triggered epigenetic changes in the babies, who then grew up to be fat. It is yet another thing you can blame on your mother.

Today, women will celebrate Galentine’s Day, a holiday trumpeting the joys of female friendships.

The holiday can trace its origins to a 2010 episode of “Parks and Rec,” in which the main character, Leslie Knope, decides that the day before Valentine’s Day should be an opportunity to celebrate the platonic love among women, ideally with booze and breakfast food.

In the years since the episode aired, the fictional holiday has caught on in the real world.

When it comes to the political divide in America, the key difference in science is that academia has mostly Democrats while private sector scientists are mostly Republicans. There are big tents in a two-party system so a liberal New York cop will have nothing in common with a San Francisco progressive but they will both vote Democrat and this big tent philosophy covers science as well. Republicans are considered deniers of climate change and evolution while Democrats deny vaccines and agriculture, and the rest of the tent has to endure them.

Environmental Working Group, a litigation group devoted to food and chemical issues, is most famous for publishing its annual "Dirty Dozen" list to promote publicly available pesticide residues on food. While neglecting to mention that their organic industry clients are not tested separately.

Results from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), using data collected from annual questionnaires from 2014 to 2018, finds that rates of skin cancer were higher among gay and bisexual men compared to heterosexual men but lower among bisexual women than heterosexual women.