Science fiction movies about aliens threatening the Earth routinely ascribe them the motive of coming here to steal our resources, most often our water.

This is ill thought-out, as water is actually extremely common. Any civilization coming to our solar system in need of water (either to drink or to make rocket fuel) would be foolish to plunge all the way inwards to the Earth, from where they’d have to haul their booty back against the pull of the sun’s gravity.

As more money has been spent on biomedical research in the United States over the past 50 years, there has been diminished return on investment in terms of life expectancy gains and new drug approvals, two Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers say.

In a report published Aug. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found that while the number of scientists has increased more than nine-fold since 1965 and the National Institutes of Health's budget has increased four-fold, the number of new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration has only increased a little more than two-fold. Meanwhile, life expectancy gains have remained constant at roughly two months per year.

Scientists working have developed a brain-computer control interface for a lower limb exoskeleton by decoding specific signals from within the user's brain using an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap.

The system allows users to move forwards, turn left and right, sit and stand simply by staring at one of five flickering light emitting diodes (LEDs), according to the paper in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

Each of the five LEDs flickers at a different frequency, and when the user focusses their attention on a specific LED this frequency is reflected within the EEG readout. This signal is identified and used to control the exoskeleton.

In February, a blogger at journal publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS),  issued a random, unsubstantiated smear against the organization I now run, the American Council on Science and Health - she claimed, bizarrely, that we lost our credibility decades ago by being shills for Big Tobacco. Ironically, she is an award-winning journalist.

Nowadays Physics is a very big chunck of science, and although in our University courses we try to give our students a basic knowledge of all of it, it has become increasingly clear that it is very hard to keep up to date with the developments in such diverse sub-fields as quantum optics, material science, particle physics, astrophysics, quantum field theory, statistical physics, thermodynamics, etcetera.

Simply put, there is not enough time within the average life time of a human being to read and learn about everything that is being studied in dozens of different disciplines that form what one may generically call "Physics. 

Australian guidelines for the ethical use of IVF allow selecting a child’s sex for medical reasons. But draft guidelines that are now open for public submissions raise the possibility of extending this and allowing the choice for social reasons.

Same-sex couples encounter more obstacles to fertility treatment than traditional couples,  said Ann V. Bell, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Delaware, who noted that the U.S. medical system is standardized to work with heterosexual couples.

When government scientists determined that there would be negligible environmental impact due to the Keystone XL pipeline, another 400 miles of new, safer pipeline in an area where 20,000 miles of older pipeline already existed were not going to ruin the ecology, President Barack Obama ordered them to study it again.

E-cigarettes are attracting massive interest for their potential in helping smokers quit, to reduce harm in those who switch from cigarettes or cut down, and in reducing the uptake of smoking in teenagers, where the argument runs that they would be best to vape instead of smoking.

Not to mention a third possibility: that they do neither.