Tectonic plates, which make up the outer layer of the earth, are rigid. It is giant layers of rock, after all. But that is a bit of a simplification. They are not rigid and don't fit together as nicely as we imagine, according to a new paper in Geology by Corné Kreemer, an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and his colleague Richard Gordon of Rice University, which quantifies deformation of the Pacific plate and challenges the central approximation of the plate tectonic paradigm that plates are rigid. 

There are a number of government-funded campaigns to promote more participation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields, with the promise that a PhD means basic discovery and improving the human condition.

Yet what is left out of expensive marketing efforts is that there are now 6 PhDs for every job in academia - just because more people want to work at a university does not mean the government will increase funding to pay for it.  Instead of selling STEM careers to students, the National Science Foundation would be doing a greater service by showing students that academia is a lot like the corporate world - you will have to compete to get ahead, otherwise you will be trapped in a low-end job in a lab forever.

It's hard to have our steak and eat it too. Red meat was once implicated in a wave of studies and linked to heart disease and other maladies, before being absolved.

But the microbiome and the surge in advertising for probiotics to promote 'healthy' gut bacteria has implicated red meat again - this time by correlating a nutrient that the authors say is changed by gut bacteria into an atherosclerosis-causing metabolite, which means hardening of the arteries.

In 2013, when PLoS One published a research paper, Complete Genes May Pass from Food to Human Blood, anti-GMO activists claimed they had proof that GMOs can “transfer” into our bodies, and threaten human health.

Now it turns out the hysteria they tried to generate was based on a study that its researchers believe went awry.

There is concern about pollution, overfishing and even climate change when it comes to reduced wild fish populations.

Farmed fish is the obvious solution but critics have a response for that also - they contend that hatchery-raised fish won't be as well adapted to their new environments or that the wild population will be "tainted" by breeding with domesticated counterparts.

In what they are terming the largest MRI study to date, a group of researchers writing in Cerebral Cortex have found that the brain anatomy in MRI scans of people with autism above age six is mostly indistinguishable from that of typically developing individuals and, therefore, of little clinical or scientific value.

It has slowly dawned on climate researchers that promoting the belief that curbing CO2 will prevent climate change has been a bad idea. American and European CO2 emissions have gone down, for example, but Asia's has risen, and we went beyond the 'point of no return' and not much has changed.

It was once the case that any mention of other climate-forcing gases got vitriol and hostile emails but now it is recognized that soot particles also contribute to global warming, along with methane. They just disappear quickly from the atmosphere. Short-lived climate pollutants (also known as Short Lived Climate Forcers - SLCF) also include sulfur dioxide, and to a much lesser extent fluorocarbons, but can have a measurable impact on the climate.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft visited the asteroid Vesta in 2011 and it showed that deep grooves circling the asteroid's equator were probably caused by a massive impact on Vesta's south pole.

A super high-speed cannon at NASA's Ames Research Center has shed new light on the violent chain of events deep in Vesta's interior that formed those surface grooves, some of which are wider than the Grand Canyon.

"Vesta got hammered," said Peter Schultz, professor of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown and the paper's senior author. "The whole interior was reverberating, and what we see on the surface is the manifestation of what happened in the interior."

Over 51 percent participants in the Liverpool Stop Smoking Service have tried electronic cigarettes and almost 46 percent are currently using them.

Results of a new search for single top production and large missing energy have been published by the ATLAS collaboration in a recent preprint. I think it is worthwhile to have a look at the idea behind this new search, as the signature of invisible particles produced in LHC collisions and escaping the detectors is important in many of the current and future investigations of beyond-the-standard-model physics.