If you tried the martini diet, the tapeworm diet and going gluten-free, science has bad news; the popular blood type diet isn't going to work any better for you. 

The 'blood-type' diet was popularized in the book "Eat Right for Your Type", written by 'naturopath' Peter D'Adamo. The hypothesis behind the diet is that the ABO blood type should match the dietary habits of our ancestors and people with different blood types process food differently. According to that, individuals adhering to a diet specific to one's blood type can improve health and decrease risk of chronic illness such as cardiovascular disease. The book was unsurprisingly a New York Times best-seller and has been translated into 52 languages and sold over 7 million copies. 

Comic book heroes get into all kinds of crazy situations, everything from alien invaders to losing their powers. Most often, though, might simply makes right -  but what happens when the thing you are fighting gets stronger from being hit? How do you defeat something like that?

It actually happened in "The Mighty Thor" #140 from 1967.

Comics were a lot different in 1967; fantastic, supernatural events were routine plot devices, but even then Marvel was the more 'scientific' of the two large superhero comics companies. Marvel loved genetic mutations and scientists were often heroes or villains but decades ago the resolution of the plot was going to be fast and likely something of a letdown.

Everyone (who can count) will instantly recognise the numbers 1 2&3 in the picture below:
Or will they? Well, no they won’t.

All is explained in an article for Osaka Keidai Ronshu, Vol. 60 number 5, where Professor Yutaka Nishiyama (Osaka University of Economics, Japan) lists many crucial variations in finger-counting across the world.

Managers of fantasy sports teams - where people draft rosters filled with players of their own choosing - spend countless hours and sometimes thousands of dollars on analysis to develop a sophisticated method of getting the best roster.

And sometimes, just like real sports, some superstition is involved.

But most fantasy sport players overestimate the role of skill and knowledge in building a winning team, and underestimate the role of luck, according to a paper in the Journal of Sports Management. 

If we want to protect the health of women, government policies should require that both parents take maternity leave, says social epidemiologist Dr. Patricia O'Campo, director of the Centre for Research on Inner City Health of St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, senior author of a new paper. 

The conclusion was based on a literature review that looked at the influence of public policies on women's overall health and found that parental leave policies tended to reduce the physical and mental stress levels in women who, historically, held the majority of the burden of childcare and household responsibilities, but that making both parents share leave means those duties would be shared also.

If you buy extra virgin olive oil, caveat emptor. Olive oil has been an avenue for corruption for hundreds and perhaps even thousands of years. Some extra virgin olive oil in studies was found to not only not be extra virgin, it wasn't even olive oil.

'Premium' chocolate has the same issue. Anyone can put Premium on a label and the only way to really know was to buy it and taste it - and if you bought it, you compounded the problem.

Sex is like pizza. Even when it's bad, it's still pretty good.

And people like all kinds of pizza. It's entirely subjective so if you ask people about their sexual satisfaction, you might as well take the answers at face value. Rich, Spanish women have better sex lives than poor ones. There you have it, according to the first Spanish National Sexual Health Survey carried out in 2009. But that doesn't mean anyone feels like their sex life is particularly bad. Spanish people are apparently having a great time.

Researchers have determined the isotope composition of the rare trace elements Hafnium and Neodymium in 2.7 billion year-old seawater using high purity chemical sediments from Temagami Banded Iron Formation (Canada) and concluded that large landmasses must have existed then.

The Temagami Banded Iron Formation was formed 2.7 billion years ago during the Neoarchean period and can be used as an archive because the isotopic composition of many chemical elements such as Hafnium and Neodymium directly mirrors the composition of Neoarchean seawater. These two very rare elements allow many valuable conclusions about weathering processes to be drawn. Earlier work has shown that these Canadian rocks only contain chemical elements that directly precipitated from ocean water.

Every child learns about photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert sunlight into energy.

It sounds simple but duplicating it elegantly remains one of the biggest challenges for chemists. Currently, the most efficient methods that we have of making fuel, like hydrogen, from sunlight and water involve expensive metal catalysts like platinum.

A forensic team has tackled a famous case from 1930 - the ‘Blazing Car Murder’ , which sounds like it came right out of the plot of a Sherlock Holmes novel.

On November 6th, 1930, a man was murdered in a car fire in in Hardingstone, Northamptonshire. Alfred Rouse was convicted of the crime and hanged at Bedford Gaol in March 1931. Home Office-appointed pathologist Bernard Spilsbury and another local pathologist, limited by the science and technology of their day, were unable to identify the victim due to the burns, but they reported that lavender colored material and light brown hair were found at the scene and they wrote that the victim’s jawbone was removed to assist with possible identification and tissue samples taken for microscopical examination.