Some people throw salt over their shoulder, some wear a particular shirt when their favorite sports team is playing, while some believe food grown using one process rather than another will mean better nutrition.  

Even smart, educated, emotionally stable people engage in superstitions that they recognize are unreasonable. 

Researchers have discovered a new SARS-like virus that can jump directly from its bat hosts to humans without mutation. 

Good news for space travelers on medication - expiration dates aren't different in the low orbit of the International Space Station (ISS). 

While the ISS is regularly resupplied with medicines to replace those which have passed their expiry date, this may not be possible on exploration missions that travel to more distant points. On Earth, medicines degrade over time, particularly when exposed to light, oxygen, or humidity. Although temperature and humidity conditions on board the ISS are generally within ideal ranges for medicine storage on Earth, until now, there has been little evidence of how medicines might react to factors unique to spaceflight, such as microgravity and constant exposure to elevated radiation levels.

The extinction of one carnivore species can trigger the demise of fellow predators - a phenomenon called horizontal extinction cascades, where extinctions of carnivore species can have a ripple effect across species triggering further unexpected extinctions of other carnivores.

Using insects, the research team Frank van Veen, Dirk Sanders and Rachel Kehoe from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University's Penryn campus in Cornwall, set up experimental communities with complex food webs in 40 four-square metre outdoor field-cages which they observed over a spring and summer season. These communities consisted of several species of aphids and their natural enemies, parasitoid wasps.

The rainwater that fell in some of the villages of Zamora, Spain last autumn brought along a green microalgae that turns a reddish color when in a state of stress.  Blood rain. It is not an isolated phenomenon.  Kerala, India got a blood rain in the summer of 2001 and since then so has the southern part of the country and Sri Lanka. Scientific studies have confirmed that the algae Trentepohlia was responsible for those events. 

PENSACOLA, Fla. - An increasing amount of drugs taken by humans and animals make it into our streams and waterways, and pharmaceutical pollution has had catastrophic ecosystem consequences despite low levels of concentration in the environment. The effect of pharmaceuticals and other contaminants of emerging concern on the environment will be addressed in a special issue of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (ET&C). Much progress has been made in the recent years on the topic and this special issue will illustrate the state of the science. Several preview articles are now available, and the complete issue will be online in spring 2016.