Some exoplanets with masses two to four times the size of Earth can be explained by large amounts of water - and they may be more common than previously thought, say researchers.

The 1992 discovery of exoplanets orbiting other stars has sparked interest in understanding the composition of these planets to determine, among other goals, whether they are suitable for the development of life. Now a new evaluation of data from the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope and the Gaia mission indicates that many of the known planets may contain as much as 50% water. This is much more than the Earth's 0.02% (by weight) water content.

A mummy dating from 3700-3500 B.C. housed in the Egyptian Museum in Turin since 1901 has never undergone any conservation treatments - and that provided a unique opportunity for some science.

And the results were a surprise. It was assumed the Turin mummy had been naturally mummified by the desiccating action of the hot, dry desert sand but chemical analysis showed that the mummy had undergone an embalming process, with a plant oil, heated conifer resin, an aromatic plant extract and a plant gum/sugar mixed together and used to impregnate the funerary textiles in which the body was wrapped.

Secondhand smoke remains controversial because it takes statistical manipulation to link it to any deaths. Yes, it can be harmful to asthmatics, just like perfume or a wine cellar, but a whole advocacy industry has not been built up talking about how wine cellars must be killing people. And the most comprehensive study ever done on secondhand smoke and mortality has never been shown to be flawed. 

On Sunday evening, John Oliver of HBO's "Last Week Tonight" took a break from talking about Paul Manafort's clothing to talk about public trust in science. Well, sort of. Really, he claimed he wanted to expose "astroturf" groups - fake organizations that look like real "grassroots" ones. You can imagine how I surprised I was on Saturday when I found out he was going to be talking about me.

Young religious Americans are more concerned about the environment than older parishioners, and that may be thanks to religious leaders. They talk about caring for the world given to them and avoid the political activism. 

Environmental trial lawyers are thrilled that the politically friendly 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California

This is scaring some people - because they describe dramatic things that could happen like floods tens of meters deep, and the world too hot for humans. Most of this is for far into the future. The sea rising 10s of meters would be thousands of years into the future - many of the news stories didn’t make that clear.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is part of the World Health Organisation, which is part of the United Nations, but it is really its own agency that shares little in common with WHO. Whereas WHO wants to save lives, IARC has taken to using statistics to scaremonger trace chemicals by conflating hazard and risk. So if high doses, 10,000 exposures of a chemical all at once, might be linked to cancer by looking at statistics, their flawed methodology, where five orders of magnitude are considered equal, will cause them to declare even 1 exposure a hazard. 

And though they do not calculate risk, they frequently talk about risk in their media kits for journalists, which leads to confusion in media and therefore the public.

Metastasis is the formation of secondary tumors and a leading contributor to deaths related to cancer. The exact mechanism for how cellular function becomes broken in cells far removed from a cancer’s primary tumor have been unclear.

But it's been pondered for almost a hundred years. It was postulated that metastatic cells spontaneously caused secondary tumors by fusing their cellular material with regular cells and re-establishing their errant gene expression, but spontaneous is not a concept scientists like, so the search for the real causes has been ongoing.