By Sara Rennekamp, Inside Science -- Last week's deadly derailment that sent an Amtrak Northeast Regional train careening off its tracks has many people asking how such a tragedy could happen.

It's not a secret that organic farms trade modern science for inefficiency in production and higher profit margins - but that does not count the 'intangibles' that go into organic farming, argue Terry Anderson and Henry Miller, and those higher margins should be accounted for in a revenue-neutral way.

A new simulation modeled the effects of land use changes on the species diversity in rivers and streams and estimates that the loss of biodiversity will caused by changes in land use practices far more than by climate change.

Despite that, climate change gets all of the attention and changing land use practices, such as clear-cutting of forests for agricultural use, are frequently neglected in the development of conservation concepts.

A  psychological analysis of novice assassins has delved into how hitmen bury their feelings after a successful attack.

Hired killers don't deal with people, they are businessmen and they are doing a job, no different than a soldier in the military.

New natural gas extraction using hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has been the biggest reason American CO2 emissions have dropped but it is not without controversy. Environmentalists have taken to videos showing 'flaming tapwater' and seek to blame natural gas for it.

Thousands of years ago those same phenomena were similar religious belief - gas and oil seeps have been part of cultural practices for thousands of years. From the Oracle at Delphi to the Chimera fires, people from Indonesia and Iran to Italy and Azerbaijan have studied and been mystified by “eternal flames”.

What makes us happy? Philosophers, psychologists and scientists have long pondered that question.

Psychologists believe they may have a solution that satisfies everyone in flow theory, a model that better preserves the approach to individual distinctiveness by considering the mental experience as a process that might foster the evolution or the involution of an individual through his daily experiences.

Meat eaters who justify their eating habits feel less guilty and are more tolerant of social inequality, say a group of authors led by psychologist Dr. Jared Piazza of Lancaster University.

Omnivores also rationalize, say the team. They have labeled the most common justifications for not adapting a vegetarian lifestyle as "the 4Ns - that meat consumption is Natural, Normal Necessary and Nice.

Natural - “Humans are natural carnivores”
Necessary - “Meat provides essential nutrients”
Normal  - “I was raised eating meat”
Nice - “It’s delicious”

Some flavorings used in electronic cigarette liquid may alter important cellular functions in lung tissue, according to a presentation at the 2015 American Thoracic Society International Conference.

The changes in cell viability, cell proliferation, and calcium signaling are flavor-dependent so coupling these results with chemicals identified in each flavor could prove useful in identifying flavors or chemical constituents that might produce adverse effects in users.

People with home-brewed beer rigs and backyard distilleries already know how to employ yeast to convert sugar into alcohol. - they soon might be able to turn sugar-fed yeast into a microbial factory for producing morphine and potentially other drugs, including antibiotics and anti-cancer therapeutics. 

It might be the age of home-brewed pharmaceuticals, DIY Bio taken to the next level.

Do we hear sounds as they are, or do our expectations about what we are going to hear shape the way sound is processed? 

Through the use of computational neuroscience models, Bournemouth University’s Dr. Emili Balaguer-Ballester and colleagues are trying to map the way that the brain processes sound.