The American Academy of Pediatrics recently recommended that screening for autism be incorporated into routine
physician check-ups, even if no concern has been raised by the parents.

Such routine screening of all children for autism gets a thumbs down from researchers at McMaster University in a Pediatrics study.  The researchers say there is "not enough sound evidence to support the implementation of a routine population-based screening program for autism."

Everyone is a journalist due to the modern Internet, we are told.   Not so, says a University of Georgia analysis.    Instead, 2 percent of people who start discussions attract about 50 percent of the replies and that is good news for traditional journalism.

The downside is they used Internet newsgroups to validate this belief - if you aren't familiar with newsgroups, that's because Web-based interfaces killed their popularity but throughout much of the 1990s newsgroups were popular and even Google makes the newsgroup interface more attractive.

Domesticated rice, Oryza sativa indica (indica) and Oryza sativa japonica (japonica), are major staple crops in Asia.   Evolutionary biologists and historians have long wondered if both once had an original point of domestication in common, or they were domesticated independently twice.  

The diving bell spider, Argyroneta aquatica, spend their entire lives underwater - they even lay their eggs in their 'diving bells'.

A new study shows that each spider constructs a net of silk in vegetation beneath the surface and fills it with air carried down on its abdomen - and the spiders can use the diving bell like a gill to extract oxygen from water to remain hidden beneath the surface.

Think you can't live without caffeine?  Some bacteria can live on caffeine.  

Previous studies discovered caffeine-degrading bacteria, but new research one goes a step further and identifies four bacteria that can live on the compound.    One of them, known as Pseudomonas putida CBB5, was found in a flowerbed outside a University of Iowa research laboratory.   Now they have identified the gene sequence that enables the bacterium to break down the caffeine compound in nature.

The expansion of the universe should slow as time marches on, some even conjectured it would slow and then collapse again - that's what all that mass and its gravity in the universe should do.

But Hubble showed us distant supernovae in the 1990s and researchers realized the universe had actually been expanding slower in the past, not faster - and that was a pickle for current theory.   So researchers hypothesized Einstein's theory of gravity and a cosmological constant might account for it,  or some strange kind of energy-fluid filled space or Einstein's theory of gravity was wrong and a new one including some kind of field creates cosmic acceleration.    No one knew what it was, but they called this mystery Dark Energy.