If you want to get quality research, you want the best researchers, right?

Not necessarily. An advanced trend in science academia is social engineering, and that means building a team that isn't simply the best minds, but has a diverse mix of ethnicity and gender and culture that can also communicate well, are socially sensitive and emotionally engaged with each other. 

Good luck quantifying how "emotionally engaged" you are at review time.

Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) use auditory or tactile stimulation to provide representations of visual information and can help the blind "see" colors and shapes.

Users recognize the image without seeing it because the information is transformed into audio or touch signals. But few people in the blind community actually use them because they are cumbersome and unpleasant to use.

Kepler-413b is located 2,300 light-years (about 700 parsecs) away in the constellation Cygnus. It circles a close pair of orange and red dwarf stars every 66 days but what really makes Kepler-413b unusual is that it precesses wildly on its spin axis - The tilt of the spin axis of the planet can vary by as much as 30 degrees over 11 years with respect to the plane of the binary star's orbit.

Compare that to the Earth's rotational precession, which is a far more modest 23.5 degrees over 26,000 years. This far-off planet is far-out and all of this complex movement leads to rapid and erratic changes in seasons.  That it is precessing on a human timescale is simply amazing. 

It's counterintuitive but psychologists say we tend to remember unattractive faces more likely than attractive ones - attractive faces leave much less distinctive impressions on our memory unless they have particularly remarkable features.

Population health has a lot of different factors - and infant mortality is one of them but it doesn't tell the entire story. Some in America laud Cuban health care, for example, but Cuba just had a cholera epidemic, something that doesn't happen in the United States.

And Cubans abort babies if there are signs of trouble, as do many industrialized nations, while America does not. Trying to save more babies is one reason why America ranks 27th among industrialized nations in infant mortality, and if you are in the business of criticizing American health care, you can stop thinking critically right there. 

Estimates say there are over 3,000,000 registered freelancers worldwide, competing for everything from computer programming and web design to finance and engineering.

How can you make yourself more attractive to potential employers?  

Does home field advantage matter? In baseball outfielders, the tricks and corners of a new baseball park might be meaningful but that effect should diminish over time. The Seattle Seahawks have a famously loud stadium and the team calls the audience "the twelfth man" but they didn't need it to rout the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl.

There are no athletes in the Olympics who are from Sochi, yet psychologists believe that Russian athletes will have a psychological edge, even though Russia covers 6,600,000 million square miles, because they have a home field advantage.

While there is a glut of PhDs in academia, to an extent where some post-doc jobs don't even pay anything, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said in 2012 that America will need an additional 1,000,000 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates in the United States over the next decade to meet corporate economic needs. In a speech last week he ridiculed art history majors. He loves scientists and wants more of them.

Organic farms support more biodiversity, supporting 34% more plant, insect and animal species than conventional farms, according to a new paper. For pollinators such as bees, the number of different species was 50% higher on organic farms, although the authors stress that the study only looked at 'species richness'.

On January 25th 1996 the CDF collaboration submitted for publication to Physical Review Letters  the result of their measurement of the rate of jet production as a function of jet transverse energy, performed on 20 inverse picobarns of data collected by the experiment in the 1992-93 run of the Tevatron collider. That measurement deviated at its high-energy tail from predictions of quantum chromodynamics, suggesting that the underlying model -and most likely, the parton distribution functions (PDF) which describe the probability of finding partons with given fractions of their parent momentum- was at fault.