I enjoy hearing about or even falling for a good harmless prank — and I certainly enjoy pulling a child or two’s string, in a cheerful, happy way, just to keep them on their toes — so, April Fools’ is one of my favorite days of the year.

The holiday underscores how important surprises are for our brains. Of course, one hopes those surprises will be delightful ones!

I sometimes like to read the arXix preprint physics site. It's where a lot of papers go before they are in journals. It was open access, a way to see what scientists were working on before the results were locked behind a corporate journal paywall, before open access was even a thing.

A small survey in Australia (n=442) found that more than half of car drivers think cyclists are not really human, and many admit to intentionally driving too close to them. 

The survey says it is the first to look at a road-user group with the problem of dehumanization, which is typically studied in relation to attitudes towards racial or ethnic groups. The authors state that cyclists have been conceptualized as a minority group and a target of negative attitudes and behavior - but if drivers can put a human face to cyclists, researchers say it could reduce aggression directed at cyclists and road trauma involving riders.

Americans with more formal education fare better on science-related questions, minorities fare worse, and Republicans and Democrats are roughly similar in their overall levels of science knowledge. according to a new study released today by Pew Research Center. 

Since the oldest millennials are now nearing 40 it may be time for sociologists and psychologists to stop writing papers on how much nurturing they will need when they arrive. They are already here. Yet papers will keep coming, perhaps until people stop wanting to read them.

A new paper in The Journal of Social Psychology claims that how well parents or guardians support millennials' psychological needs prior to their transition to college is an important predictor of their psychological well-being as they adapt to college life.

Last Monday and Tuesday I gave a few lectures on Machine Learning at a Data Science school (IDPASC) in Braga, Portugal. I think that this topic has received so much attention in the last few years, with heaps of excellent resources now freely available online, that it is very difficult to be original and provide useful information to any student who is proactive enough to google "auto-encoders" by herself.

As if mothers don't get blamed for enough, a new paper claims attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)may have been caused by her diet during pregnancy.

The results of a study led by a team from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by "la Caixa", suggest that the risk of a child developing symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may be modulated by the mother's diet during pregnancy. The study, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, analysed samples of umbilical cord plasma to quantify the levels of omega-6 and omega-3 that reach the foetus. The statistical analysis showed a higher omega-6:omega-3 ratio to be associated with a higher risk of ADHD symptoms at seven years of age.

A woman in Scotland can feel virtually no pain due to a mutation in a previously-unidentified gene, FAAH-OUT, according to a new research paper in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.

She also experiences very little anxiety and fear, and may have enhanced wound healing due to the mutation   

The more intensive and narrow the agricultural process, the more intensive the greenhouse gas emissions - which means your organic vegetables, wild-caught salmon, and free-range grass fed beef is a larger contributor to climate change than modern farming techniques.

And that means rich White people disproportionately affect the environment through their eating habits, according to a new report in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.

The report looks at what different demographic populations eat and was undertaken to get a better understanding of the environmental impacts of the food consumption patterns of major demographic groups.

A Massachusetts-based company earlier this month cleared the last regulatory hurdle from the Food and Drug Administration to sell genetically engineered salmon in the U.S. Animal genomics expert Alison Van Eenennaam, who served on an advisory committee to the FDA to evaluate the AquAdvantage salmon, explains the significance of the FDA’s move and why some have criticized its decision.

1. How is AquaBounty’s salmon different from a conventional salmon?