No country is immune from gender discrimination, says the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Report, and most companies feel like they are gender neutral and perhaps are - but because people and perceptions are different it's dificult to say what is discrimination and what is sensitivity or even militancy.

It's not to say there aren't disparities - "No country in the world has yet managed to eliminate the gender gap"  they write in the report.   But it may be more looking for causation in the correlation than entrenche discrimination. 

If you're a child of the 1970s you remember peak oil - it was a book that claimed by 1992 we were going to reach maximum capacity and then it would gradually become more scarce.   If you're a fan of science fiction, it meant a world where oil was worth more than gold and we put machine guns on cars to fight over stuff.  More likely, we would come up with an alternative, but not before government lobbyists got subsidies for things we know won't work.

Herbal medicines are more common in Asian countries to treat pre-diabetes (impaired glucose tolerance or IGT), the precursor of diabetes but is there any hard scientific evidence to confidently recommend their use?

No.  That doesn't mean they aren't a viable treatment but, or that they haven't worked in some people, just like the confounding placebo effect, but more research would be needed to establish whether Chinese herbal medicines can reduce the likelihood of developing diabetes the way advocates claim.

A study combining family- and population-based approaches has uncovered a single-letter change in the genetic code that is associated with autism.  The finding implicates a neuronal gene not previously tied to the disorder and more broadly, underscores a role for common DNA variation. In addition, the new research highlights two other regions of the genome, which are likely to contain rare genetic differences that may also influence autism risk.

There is a subset of people in the environmental conservation movement who hate their fellow man - they like nature but don't think anyone outside of their companies should enjoy it, they should just pay companies to raise money for advocacy.

Everyone's heard of open heart surgery but closed heart surgery could one day be just as ubiquitous, according to research from the Universities of Michigan and Minnesota in the FASEB Journal.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart failure is a condition where the heart cannot pump enough blood and oxygen to meet the needs of other body organs. Approximately 5 million people in the United States have heart failure, about 550,000 new cases are diagnosed each year, and more than 287,000 people in the United States die each year of heart failure. The most common causes of heart failure are coronary artery disease, hypertension or high blood pressure, and diabetes.