Facebook has more than 1.23 billion active users. Most of them are not actually friends with each other and because they are not friends with each other, they feel pushy recommending products or services. They're fine hammering on politics and religion, but endorsing a car looks too corporate.

That's bad news for Facebook's business model, which has so far convinced advertisers they need to spend money. Facebook has tinkered with everything from forcing contributors to pay to have their posts seen by people on their list to pushing ads more aggressively based on everything from browser cookies to media use on the PCs of members.

If your glass is half full, you recognize that in recent geological history, 90,000 of every 100,000 years have been ice ages, and it's been 12,000 years since the last one. In that light, global warming might be a good thing.

Due to the president making bee colonies a national priority, there is a lot of talk from environmentalists about banning neonicotinoid pesticides but they may be blaming out of convenience rather than evidence. 

Car and truck exhaust fumes can be bad for humans and for pollinators too. In new research on how pollinators find flowers when background odors are strong, University of Washington and University of Arizona researchers have found that both natural plant odors and human sources of pollution can conceal the scent of sought-after flowers.

New immigration research from Rice University, the University of North Carolina and the Centre for Population, Poverty and Public Policy Studies suggests the U.S. should re-evaluate its definition of skilled workers to include informal skills of migrant workers.

The study, "Identifying and Measuring the Lifelong Human Capital of 'Unskilled' Migrants in the Mexico-U.S. Migrator Circuit," draws on a binational multistage research project that involved interviews with 320 Mexican migrants and return migrants in North Carolina and Guanajuato, Mexico. The study identifies lifelong human capital – knowledge and technical and social skills – acquired and transferred throughout these migrants' careers.

In rodent models, a drug that blocks the action of the enzyme Cdk5 could substantially reduce brain damage if administered shortly after a stroke, according to a new paper in the Journal of Neuroscience, because aberrant Cdk5 activity causes nerve cell death during stroke.

Old World monkeys have undergone a remarkable evolution in facial appearance as a way of avoiding interbreeding with closely related and geographically proximate species, according to a new paper which provides best evidence to-date for the role of visual cues as a barrier to breeding across species.

The researchers studied guenons—a group of more than two dozen species of monkeys indigenous to the forests of Central and West Africa. Many different species of guenons are often sympatric—they live in close proximity to each other, with multiple species often traveling, feeding, and sleeping side-by-side. Therefore interbreeding, which could result in afflicted infertile offspring, remains an unwelcome possibility. 

What is believed to be the smallest force ever measured, 42 yoctonewtons, has been detected by at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

A yoctonewton is one septillionth of a newton and there are approximately 3 x 10²³ yoctonewtons in one ounce of force.
 That's tiny. Using a combination of lasers and a unique optical trapping system that provides a cloud of ultracold atoms, the researchers detected the minute force.

PHILADELPHIA (June 26, 2014)— In the first pilot study asking adults on the autism spectrum about their experiences with driving, researchers at Drexel University found significant differences in self-reported driving behaviors and perceptions of driving ability in comparison to non-autistic adults. As the population of adults with autism continues growing rapidly, the survey provides a first step toward identifying whether this population has unmet needs for educational supports to empower safe driving – a key element of independent functioning in many people's lives.