This is an article from Head to Head, a series in which academics from different disciplines chew over current debates. Let us know what else you’d like covered – all questions are welcome..

Sharon George: Plastics are ingrained in our everyday lives. Since 1950, it’s estimated that we have produced billions of tons of plastic, and most of this is not recycled.

Plastics have spread around the world through oceans, rivers and the air to every part of the planet. In rivers and oceans, plastic moves vast distances and is now found right through the water column of the oceans, from the surface to the deepest trenches.

There's no question "Gone With The Wind" is the most successful movie of all time, when you count tickets sold, but it's not the most influential. Nor is "Star Wars."

A network analysis instead shows that title goes to "The Wizard Oz", the definitive Judy Garland film. released in the same year as "Gone With The Wind."

The North American Free Trade Agreement won't see its 25th birthday. The United States, Canada, and Mexico have signed on the dotted line for its replacement, The United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement.

The debate fell outside usual positions. Free trade is the hallmark of Republicans, they say, but they seemed to be unhappy with NAFTA. Democrats, in the old days, were protectionist about American workers, yet their criticisms suggested they wanted to keep manufacturing jobs in Mexico and for Canadian farmers to have a good deal in the U.S. while America got penalized in Canada.

What gives?  

In 8,000 B.C., when there were only about 10 million people on the entire planet, the boom and bust of famine and feast and wondering when the next meal would be was already a cultural concern. 

And so agriculture was created. Mankind set out to do genetic engineering, doing RNA Interference (RNAi) cereals, legumes, roots and tubers. They not only scientifically selected for larger fruits, uniform ripening and taste, they even turned dangerous natural foods into healthy ones. 

Do you want to believe that your car grill is determined by your personality or that lap dancers get better tips when they are ovulating? You probably like evolutionary psychology. Want to believe that surveys of psychology undergraduates at elite schools represent humanity, without the expense and risk of dealing with real people, who can be pretty sketchy? Social psychology is for you.(1)

Scientists don't think much of either and would prefer they stay in the humanities buildings, because evolutionary psychologists want to make everything about sex, while social psychologists claim there are no differences between sexes. 

Do Drosophila, commonly called fruit flies, have culture?

Culture, lasting changes in a group that cannot be ascribed to genetic or ecological variation, is obviously a human quality, and it may be found in other vertebrates like some other primates and birds. A new computer simulation says it may be in fruit flies also.

Fruit flies can learn and copy the sexual preferences of their conspecifics after observing them copulating. For a behavioral pattern to be deemed culturally transmitted, there are considered:

1) the behavior must be learned socially, which is to say by observing conspecifics,
2) be copied from older individuals,
3) be memorized over the long term,

Want to know how to create a $1 million company? Give $60 million to someone claiming they are going to revolutionize journalism by hiring a bunch of young, edgy people who don't care about business or making money, but who believe success happens by being popular on Facebook.

You know who is the only company with long-term success being popular on Facebook? Facebook. For everyone else, it is a terrible business model. "Field of Dreams" was just a movie, folks, wishful thinking and building something no one wanted is not why Reaganomics worked. 

Women May Earn Just 49 Cents on the Dollar, is the title of an article by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic.

It's only below the fold that, after laying out lots of links and obfuscation and conflicting claims designed to make the audience believe the situation is oh so complicated that we get this quiet disclaimer:

One of the most baffling puzzles of modern astrophysics is the nature of Fast Radio Bursts, which were discovered in 2007. These are seemingly rare, extremely bright flashes of light with radio wavelengths. They last only milliseconds; originate outside our galaxy, the Milky Way; come from regions with enormously strong magnetic fields; and pass through a significant amount of gas or dust before reaching Earth.

John Wiley  &  Sons Inc., the global academic publishing house with nearly $2 billion in revenue, recently got embroiled in a Twitter controversy about the efforts of one publication to go open access.