The nice thing about telescopes is that we can look back in time - light that is reaching us now may have originated a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which means astronomers can view the universe as it was when it was much younger.

But sometimes we can be fooled by entire galaxies. DDO 68, otherwise known as UGC 5340, a ragged collection of stars and gas clouds, at first was thought to be a recently-formed galaxy in our own cosmic neighborhood.

But it's not as young as it looks. 

For some people, their own standard is much more demanding that anything the outside world could expect. Perfectionism is a bigger risk factor in suicide than it is credited for, says York University Psychology Professor Gordon Flett, who is calling for closer attention to its potential destructiveness, adding that clinical guidelines should include perfectionism as a separate factor for suicide risk assessment and intervention.

A new evolutionary psychology paper says that men and women have different age preferences regarding sexual partners - but it's primarily women realize their preferences. 

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine has been controversial in both the United States and European countries like Germany. It prevents about 70% of cervical cancers, cervical cancer is uncommon and highly treatable, and it will need another vaccine before girls who are given it even become adults. Along with those data issues, academic scientists and the public have been engaged in a culture war against pharmaceutical companies - that vaccines are exempt from ordinary lawsuits and that the vaccine was marketed heavily just after an expensive settlement by manufacturer Merck was not lost on the public.

Does simultaneously using a mobile phone, a laptop and other media devices change the structure of our brains? Sure, so did reading that sentence. We all have different experiences and therefore different brains.

No one knows you like you know yourself so if you think your memory is slipping, you may be onto something. Self-reported memory complaints are strong predictors of clinical memory impairment later in life. 

 Richard Kryscio, PhD, Chairman of the Department of of Biostatistics and Associate Director of the Alzheimer's Disease Center at the University of Kentucky, and colleagues asked 531 people with an average age of 73 and free of dementia if they had noticed any changes in their memory in the prior year. The participants were also given annual memory and thinking tests for an average of 10 years. After death, participants' brains were examined for evidence of Alzheimer's disease.

Almost 2 million Americans have an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and about 100,000 are blind from the disease. In AMD, cells in the retina, that layer of tissue in the back of the eye, begin to break down. What was once sharp central vision becomes blurry. 

An example of unidirectional cause and effect: bad weather means umbrella sales rise, but buying umbrellas won't make it rain. Credit: Mariusz Olszewski/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

By Jonathan Borwein (Jon), University of Newcastle and Michael Rose, University of Newcastle

Surveys are interesting and surveys can sometimes indicate what a certain number of people in a group might be thinking - but so can betting services. In the 2012 election, the Intrade betting service got as many states right in the presidential election as Democratic statistical wunderkind Nate Silver did - and Intrade is mostly Europeans who know nothing at all about American politics.