By Peter Bloom, The Open University

"Interstellar" has been praised for its attempt to make the “hard science” of astrophysics both accessible and exciting to a popular audience.

Through cutting-edge special effects, it takes audiences on a journey through space and time. It does so by drawing on groundbreaking scientific theories involving relativity, wormholes, black holes and the power of gravity.

By Ross MacKenzie; Benjamin Hawkins, London School of Hygiene&Tropical Medicine, and Thomas Novotny, San Diego State University

New artificial intelligence software uses photos to locate documents on the Internet with far greater accuracy than ever before, showing for the first time that a machine learning algorithm for image recognition and retrieval is accurate and efficient enough to improve large-scale document searches online.

The system uses pixel data in images and potentially video - rather than just text -- to locate documents. It learns to recognize the pixels associated with a search phrase by studying the results from text-based image search engines. The knowledge gleaned from those results can then be applied to other photos without tags or captions, making for more accurate document search results. 

Imagine we gave you three letters, say G, C and D. Then we gave you a name to associate to some combination of those three letters. How many could you recall on command?

Guitarists in cover bands do that all of the time. They can play thousands of songs from memory, and it's not uncommon in most musicians. There have been numerous studies regarding music and memory and a peek inside the brains of professional musicians adds to that.

You can't catch attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) but you wouldn't know that by the way diagnoses are spreading - up 10X in some countries. 

An epidemiology analysis finds that acculturative stress, which is a term created to highlight that immigrants straddling two different cultures have greater stress than natives, is the reason Latino youth in Indiana have higher suicide and depression rates than white counterparts.

Young people are forced to be one thing in their homes and then also part of the larger outside culture and the conflict
between Latino teens and their parents regarding what they do and how they should act at, for example, school versus home, adds to the pressure of teenage years.

A single gram of turmeric at breakfast could help improve the memory of people who are in the very early stages of diabetes and potentially at greater risk of cognitive impairment.

Turmeric is widely used in Asian cooking. Its characteristic yellow color is due to curcumin, which accounts for 3 to 6 per cent of turmeric and has been found in some studies to reduce the risk of dementia. The finding has particular significance given that the world's aging population and higher risk of dementia.

Monash University Professor Wahlqvist recently led a study in Taiwan that tested the working memory of men and women aged 60 or older who had recently been diagnosed with untreated pre-diabetes.

It is a weekly event in epidemiology - some medical or health outcome is linked to socioeconomic inequality, as if more spending makes people healthy.

We like to think of evolution as a fine-tuning process, one that whittles away genetic imperfections and redundancies and converges on a more efficient system because of 'survival of the fittest'.

But natural selection is just one mechanism of evolution and what is fittest at one point may not have been fittest at another, yet could still be inherited. Our bodies are full of parts that we inherited and either don't work anymore or are rather buggy and other parts have simply found a way to make work.