Stampedes occur often, and not just in wild animal herds. Previously, physicists developed numerous models of crowd evacuation dynamics based on disasters such as the yearly Muslim Hajj or of the Love Parade disaster in Germany in 2010.

If crowd dynamics models were used for evacuation routes in those casualties, they weren't very good. A new study in EPJ B outlines a procedure for quantitatively comparing different crowd models, which also helps to compare these models with real-world data.

Wal-Mart caters to people with less money and there has long been a link between poverty and crime.

Criminologists have instead taken the additional step of implicating Wal-Mart in crime rates.

Communities across the United States saw decline in crime during the 1990s. Some said it was due to more abortions, others due to more police and a society less willing to coddle criminals. Scott Wolfe, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, and David Pyrooz, assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Sam Houston State University, write in the British Journal of Criminology, says it had to do with Wal-Mart not being there. 

A drug given to pregnant mice with models of autism prevents autistic behavior in their offspring, according to a new report, and though the drug could not be administered prenatally in humans - there is no way to screen for autism in human fetuses - clinical trials of this drug administered later in development, in young children who have already developed autistic symptoms, have showm promise. 

The causes of autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, are complex and not well understood.

Researchers have discovered an unusual bacterial protein that attaches to virtually any antibody and prevents it from binding to its target. Protein M, as it is called, probably helps some bacteria evade the immune response and establish long-term infections.

If follow-up studies confirm Protein M's ability to defeat the antibody response, it is likely to become a target of new antibacterial therapies. The protein's unique ability to bind generally to antibodies also should make it a valuable tool for research and drug development.

The autism community agrees that autism has its origins in early life—fotal and/or postnatal.

Satellite observations of global sea-surface temperature have shown that a 30-year upward trend slowed in the last 15 years.  It can't be due to successful mitigation, since outside the United States and a few countries in Europe, CO2 emissions have not dropped back to those levels.

Some satellites carry instruments that provide a global view of the surface temperature of oceans and seas. Satellite and local readings show that sea-surface temperature rose rapidly during the 1970s and '80s but then significantly slowed in the last 15 years.

 Mesopelagic fishes like lantern fishes (Myctophidae) and cyclothonids (Gonostomatidae) live in the twilight zone of the ocean, between 200 and 1,000 meters deep.

 With a stock estimated at 1,000 million tons so far, mesopelagic fish dominate the total biomass of fish in the ocean and are the most numerous vertebrates of the biosphere. Now it turns out they have been severely underestimated. Researchers writing in Nature Communications have estimated their numbers are 10 times higher than previous estimated, based on acoustic observations conducted during the circumnavigation of the Malaspina Expedition.

Policy makers know to hit biology where it counts; in the wallet. Rural farmers in Mexico have seen honey shipments to Germany rejected because of genetically modified organism (GMO) soybean pollen in honey samples

Is it harmful? No, but that is not how European science policy is written. Instead, because GMO soybean pollen in honey has not been approved for human consumption in honey, it as returned as unsafe and farmers have to take the hit - unless they stop using GMOs and use more pesticides and herbicides.

The world's oceans contain algae that produce certain chemicals
that can accumulate in seafood and are known to cause brain damage.

This natural neurotoxin, domoic acid, is a very stable and heat resistant and is also toxic to the kidneys, but at much lower concentrations than guidance has suggested, according to an upcoming study in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN).

It's cold and snowy just about everywhere except where you expect it. Ice in northern Alaska’s lakes during winter months is on the decline, as shown by twenty years of satellite radar imagery demonstrating how changes in our climate are affecting high-latitude environments - at least in the last few decades. 

Changes in air temperature and winter precipitation over the last five decades have affected the timing, duration and thickness of the ice cover on lakes in the Arctic. In this region, warmer climate conditions result in thinner ice cover on shallow lakes and, consequently, a smaller fraction of lakes freezing all the way through during winter months.