We've all offered an excuse for a poor reaction or any behavior we recognize we should not have engaged in; many have rationalized it to mitigate consequences or even make it socially acceptable. 

Stress, headaches, even ignorance can be proffered, but what makes an excuse plausible? In law, things are a little more clear, duress and coercion and psychological maladies have all been successful, but to families and friends it might not be as easy as convincing a jury of strangers. Especially if you do it often.

At the recent Academy of Neurology Congress, scholars reported that among 1,034 people recruited from 35 countries via an online crowdsourcing platform asked if they'd ever had an Near Death Experience, 289 answered 'yes.' When were asked for more details, using a 16 point questionnaire called the Greyson Near-Death Experience Scale, 106 reached a threshold of 7 on the Greyson NDE Scale. Some 55 percent perceived the their feeling as truly life-threatening.

Among respondents, 73 percent who claimed a near death experience said it was unpleasant, but those with a score of 7 or above on the Greyson NDE Scale had 53 percent pleasant descriptions of it.

It's so sad when people think they can't have children because of climate change. Two years ago most of these parents weren't despairing; they didn’t even give it thought. Climate change was not an election issue in the US elections in 2016, or the UK elections in 2017 even. Now it is one of the top issues for most governments worldwide. This gives so much more hope for the future, for those who have been following it all along, but many of those who have just begun to give it serious attention for a couple of years are already despairing only three years after the Paris agreement.

This is all topsy turvy. The underlying situation hasn't changed significantly. Scientists knew all of this (in less detail) decades ago.

Doctors, like scientists, often aren't big on putting themselves into stories and getting selfies with patients, or even accepting pictures as part of care. But selfies are a part of modern culture, and that means they are empowering to patients, so allowing pictures from patients and parents of patients may streamline health care and also keep costs lower.

DDT and other chemicals remain the most effective way to contain malaria - by eliminating the disease vectors that spread it.
But even though the U.S. EPA has written the book for how DDT is to be sprayed inside homes, it was banned here over the objections of scientists and remains controversial for environmental groups who want to ban all chemicals. A new method may make chemicals less necessary but it involves another area of science activists oppose; genetic engineering.

For those who used to believe that taking on massive student loan debt to pay for increased salaries for university employees that would lead to a high salary, a new reality has set in: the gig economy. 

And that counts in journalism too. In the days of Walter Cronkite and Watergate, media enjoyed a great deal of trust, but as the public got more savvy about bias that trust declined and people began to seek out alternative sources. If media are going to be biased, people believed, it might as well be biased in ways they like. 

Some species have thrived only because they are food sources. Cows, for example, would be endangered and likely extinct if not for human animal husbandry. The same goes for many vegetables. They would be sparse or even gone if not for our genetic intervention.

Plasma is like a lightning bolt, when it happens underwater.

A new study explored how electrochemical cells that help recycle CO2 but whose catalytic surfaces get worn down in the process might be regenerated at the push of a button - using extreme plasmas in water. To show proof ofconcept, they deployed optical spectroscopy and modeling to analyze such underwater plasmas in detail, which exist only for a few nanoseconds, and to theoretically describe the conditions during plasma ignition.

Particle physicists call "jet" the combined effect of many particles produced together when an energetic quark or gluon is kicked out of the hadron it called home, or when it is produced out of the blue by the decay of a massive particle. 
The clearest example of the first process are the collisions we routinely produce at the Large Hadron Collider, where pairs of protons traveling at close to the speed of light bang into each other head-on. Protons are like bags of garbage: they contain a complex mix of quarks and gluons. So what happens in the collision is that one individual quark or gluon inside one proton hits a corresponding constituent in the other proton; the two pointlike objects scatter off each other, and get ejected out of the proton containing them. 

More than 2 billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide, which means coffee beans used in all those lattes, espressos and mochas create a livelihood for millions of people worldwide.

Yet coffee plant production remains decidedly low-tech, and gimmick labels like "organic" and "fair trade" keep developing nations growing coffee stuck in the past. That has resulted in a "biennial effect" in yields, where years with high yields are often followed by years with low yields. The biennial effect makes it challenging for coffee breeders to compare yields from different varieties of coffee. Without accurate measures of yield, breeders cannot know which varieties of coffee would be most useful for farmers to grow.