Elites in California and Washington and New York like to claim they are showing leadership with every fad they embrace - they should be showing leadership by telling their citizens to stop promoting anti-vaccine nonsense. 

Otherwise, the US could end up like the UK, where an ongoing culture war against genetic modification, vaccines and the other science wars of progressives have results in a 20 percent chance that a child with a persistent cough have Pertussis - whooping cough - even if they have been vaccinated.  Whooping cough is a highly transmissible infection which can cause symptoms such as coughing, vomiting and whooping. However, whooping cough can lead to serious complications in unvaccinated infants. 

Adults diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome are nine times more likely to have suicidal thoughts than people from the UK general population, according to a paper The Lancet Psychiatry which consisted of a survey of 374 individuals (256 men and 118 women) diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome as adults between 2004 and 2013 at the Cambridge Lifetime Asperger Syndrome Service (CLASS) clinic in Cambridge.

Asperger Syndrome is an autism spectrum condition. In Asperger Syndrome, people show some of the social symptoms of autism but don't have delayed language or intellectual disability. In the UK, one in 100 people (around 700,000) has one form of autism spectrum condition or another. 

Driving is no fun any more. When is the last time you saw someone buy a pair of driving gloves? These days, it is a chore. It would be much better to let someone else take the wheel but the only viable alternative is public transportation - and about the first time some crazy hobo screams at you and your family, they are never going to want to take it again. 

A computer analysis of photographs could help doctors diagnose which condition a child with a rare genetic disorder has, using a computer program that recognizes facial features in photographs, looks for similarities with facial structures for various conditions, such as Down's syndrome, Angelman syndrome, or Progeria, and returns possible matches ranked by likelihood. 

Using the latest in computer vision and machine learning, the algorithm increasingly learns what facial features to pay attention to and what to ignore from a growing bank of photographs of people diagnosed with different syndromes.

Just a few short years ago, sugar growers and packagers had to have felt pretty good. Thanks to a rash of suspect epidemiological claims about high-fructose corn syrup, and then marketing claims and labels touting a lack of HFCS (even pancake syrup, made of corn syrup, got labels saying it was not HFCS), they had to feel good about the future.

No more. The low-fat, low-calorie, gluten-free diet craze has also clearly turned on sugar, if New York Times stories are the barometer for that demographic. And it is.

A new study using snow during a Minnesota blizzard gave researchers new insight into the airflow around large wind turbines.

Thanks to subsidies, wind turbines are not going away until at least February of 2017, so improving wind energy efficiency is essential, especially in wind farms where airflows from many large wind turbines interact with each other, a problem that no one included in estimates of cost versus value.

Erythritol is the sweetener most people in the western world have never heard about. It can only be produced with the help of special kinds of yeast in highly concentrated molasses but it has a number of advantages: it does not make you fat, it does not cause tooth decay, it has no effect on the blood sugar and, unlike other 'artificial' sweeteners, it does not have a laxative effect.

Erythritol is more common in Asia and researchers at TU Vienna have developed a method that could make it popular in the US and Europe - they can produce it from ordinary straw with the help of a mold fungus. The experiments have been a big success, and now the procedure will be optimized for industry.

Can emotional states be measured quantitatively?

A team of researchers at KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea has developed a flexible, wearable 20mm x 20mm polymer sensor that can directly measure the degree and occurrence of  piloerection
- commonly known as goose bumps, which is caused by sudden changes in body temperature or emotional states. 

Interesting science and technology, but also a dream for politicians and advertisers. Imagine a world in which real-time physical and emotional response helped to determine the experience of political campaigns, online ads or the temperature in the room. 

Around 165 million years ago, a bizarre parasite lived in the freshwater lakes of present-day Inner Mongolia - fly larva with a thorax formed entirely like a sucking plate.

With this odd thorax, the animal could adhere to salamanders and suck their blood with its mouthparts formed like a sting. To date no insect is known that is equipped with a similar specialised design. 

Mental fitness tools are all the rage. Companies are pushing out various brain games that claim they can boost cognitive powers. Do they work? Most studies say no but a new paper finds that playing a puzzle game like Cut the Rope for as little as an hour a day led to improved executive functions.

Executive functions in the brain are important for making decisions in everyday life when you have to deal with sudden changes in your environment – better known as thinking on your feet. An example would be when the traffic light turns amber and a driver has to decide in an instant if he will be able to brake in time or if it is safer to travel across the intersection.