After 20 years of grueling research, unimaginably effective drugs to treat hepatitis C are hitting the market. They are so good that cure rates (aka sustained virological response, or SVR)—defined as the absence of detectable hepatitis C virus (HCV) RNA six months following cessation of treatment—are approaching 100 percent. Even ten years ago this would have been regarded as science fiction.

These drugs are quite expensive. But, are they worth it? 

Some Ecuadorian tribes were famous for making mummified shrunken heads (click for the recipe) from the remains of their conquered foes. 

Perhaps they got the idea from nature. Field work in the cloud forests of Ecuador has resulted in the discovery of 24 new species of Aleiodes wasps - that mummify caterpillars.  24 new insect are species described by Eduardo Shimbori and Scott Shaw in ZooKeys and they don't mind glorifying celebrities in the naming.

Richard Somerville and Susan Hassol have some recommendations for how to improve science communication.

There are about 9,700 known species of grasshoppers in the world. Now there is one more, and it has beeen named  Grammy-award winning singer and Mexican activist Ana Lila Downs Sanchez.

Locals called the creature the friar grasshopper because its head looks a bit like what a monk with his hood pulled back might look like and so the scientific name of the new grasshopper is Liladownsia fraile. In Spanish, "friale" means friar.  

The new species was discovered on the side of a mountain road near Oaxaca, Mexico. 
The men were doing fieldwork for another grasshopper study in a pine-oak forest of the Sierra Madre del Sur Mountain Range in Oaxaca, Mexico, when they came across their discovery in 2011.

Pollution is bad, right? To some animals, it's home.

Thousands of shipping containers are lost from cargo vessels each year and many of them sink, never to be found again. 

In February 2004, the cargo vessel Med Taipei was traveling southward along the California coast when severe winds and seas dislodged 24 shipping containers, 15 of which were lost within the boundaries of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Four months later, during a routine research dive using the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Ventana, MBARI scientists discovered one of these containers on the seafloor 4,200 feet below the surface.

Would reducing smog lead to higher earnings?

Yes, say Columbia University professor of Environmental Health Science
Frederica Perera
 and colleagues. They correlate reduced air pollution to higher IQ. When two curves need to match to create causation and correlation arrows, it's easy to do. What started going up in the early 1960s? American Nobel prizes. What went down? Air pollution. You can make the same argument with organic food. Kids of organic farmers have lower IQs than kids in Manhattan.

 The PRIORI project at University of Michigan says they have created a smartphone app that monitors subtle qualities of a person's voice during everyday phone conversations - and can detect early signs of mood changes in people with bipolar disorder. 

The app still needs a lot of testing before it can be used outside controlled conditions, but the creators say early results from a small group of patients show its potential to monitor moods while protecting privacy.  

The project is
led by computer scientists Zahi Karam, Ph.D. and Emily Mower Provost, Ph.D., and psychiatrist Melvin McInnis, M.D.  They presented first findings on PRIORI
at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Italy. 

You've really got to hand it to all those 15-minute oil change places that dot the American landscape: they know how to pull motorists in.

With their brightly colored signs and endless promotions, it’s no wonder they succeed in getting our business. Whether you’re driving a brand new sports car or sedan with 200,000 miles on it, you’re welcome to drive up, get fresh oil and drive away...no problem.

But when it comes to bone marrow transplants, the sobering fact is that the age of the vehicle —in this case, your body — does matter.

Gluten-free fads are all the rage and a preliminary result by reseachers at the University of Copenhagen want to see if there are health benefits for people who don't have celiac disease.

Their experiments on found that mouse mothers on a gluten-free diet led to pups less likely to  develop type 1 diabetes. There's no reason to start paying 242% more for your food just yet.

Researchers have reported a unique discovery; the marine dinoflagellate Dapsilidinium pastielsii in Southeast Asia, notably the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool. 

This unicellular species, with planktonic and benthic stages, was previously thought to have become extinct within the early Pleistocene. It evolved more than 50 million years ago and is the last survivor of a major early Cenozoic lineage.

The discovery of living D. pastielsii in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool  suggests that this stable environment served as an important refuge for thermophilic dinoflagellates, and its disappearance from the Atlantic following the early Pleistocene implicates cooling.