During the 1920s, the cartoonist Rube Goldberg became immensely popular churning out cartoons that depicted devices that performed simple tasks in impossibly indirect and convoluted ways.

In 1931, the Merriam-Webster dictionary even adopted the word “Rube Goldberg” as an adjective describing making something that should be simple incredibly complicated.

Welcome to Vermont’s fumbled efforts at drafting the rules for its mandatory GMO labeling law.

Most modern cryptographic schemes rely on complexity for security - they can be cracked, but that would take a prohibitively long time, even with enormous computational resources.

Information-theoretic security, in which even an adversary with unbounded computational power could extract no useful information from an encrypted message, is far too complicated to be practical. With the current White House administration engaged in an unprecedented level of domestic spying, there is a great deal of interest in privacy even the government can't crack.

It's not all bad news for older brains. Credit: Shutterstock

By Angela Gutchess, Brandeis University

If you see a bat zooming toward you this evening, cover your hair. But if you do get bit, you will probably not the flu.

Halloween bats can be a little scary knowing they are not going to spread most viruses. A research project finds that influenza viruses carried by bats pose a low risk to humans.

Fantasizing about sex with two women is common but fantasizing about being urinated on - called a golden shower - is not.

That's just one of the findings from a research project on sexual deviation undertaken by scholars at Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal and Institut Philippe-Pinel de Montréal.

Deviant sexual fantasies are addressed in numerous speculations and conjectures by psychologists but atypical fantasies (paraphilias) are so subjective they aren't really defined. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) refers to "anomalous" fantasies, while the World Health Organization talks about "unusual" fantasies in defining paraphilias.

Children and adults alike are digging out those spooky costumes ready for a celebration.

We’ve reached that time of year again: Halloween. October 31 is dedicated to remembering the dead.

We’ve all experienced fear, but Halloween is the particular time of year when we look for that rush that usually accompanies feeling scared. Are you in need of a “scare-specialist” for this year’s Halloween celebrations? Then you need not look further than your very own brain.

4 billion light-years away, inside a collection of nearly 500 galaxies called Pandora's Cluster, are the faint, ghostly glow of stars gravitationally ripped apart several billion years ago.

The scattered stars are no longer bound to any one galaxy and drift freely between galaxies in the cluster. By observing the light from the orphaned stars, Hubble astronomers have assembled forensic evidence that suggests as many as six galaxies were torn to pieces inside the 
Abell 2744
cluster over a stretch of 6 billion years.

Biology can be inspirational.  The spiral ramps in multistory parking garages, the way they are stacked and connecting parallel levels, are replications of helical structures found in a ubiquitous membrane structure in the cells of the body - Terasaki ramps in an organelle called the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a network of membranes found throughout the cell and connected to and surrounding the cell nucleus.

A team of researchers have described endoplasmic reticulum geometry using the language of theoretical physics in Physical Review Letters.

Tropical Cyclone Nilofar is closing in on the border between Pakistan and northwestern India and NASA's Terra satellite caught it while it passed overhead from space.

Wind shear continued to affect the storm and from their image it looks more like a comet than a tropical cyclone.