There is no magic food that causes weight gain, in every study people who consume fewer calories than they burn lose weight while people who consume more gain it. Energy balance, like evolution and Einstein, has survived all challengers. 

Yet the biology underlying the breakdown of stored fat molecules is not well known. A new paper posits that nerves embedded in fat tissue have previously unrecognized capability. If they receive the right signal, they have an astonishing capacity to grow. At least in mice.

We're going to learn a lot more about how bats do all of the things they do, in part due to the work of the Bat1K consortium to sequence the genome of six widely divergent living bat species.

Is it possible to predict nonlinear behavior, such as when a protest will become a riot? Perhaps, though parameters bring special challenges.

We've seen the weaknesses of numerical modeling when it comes to disease epidemiology, and many of those concerns were evident before SARS-CoV-2 took the world by storm. In Chile of 2019, social unrest disrupted the daily routines of many citizens so scholars recently combined well-known epidemic models with tools from the physics of chaos and interpreted their findings through the lens of social science as economics.

In many groups, everyone seems to agree more or less all the time. Meetings are dominated by a few individuals or even one while everyone else plays along - until you talk to people individually.  

Why does such meeting inertia happen? For some, voicing disagreement is difficult. Some may want the meeting to be over, so piping up five minutes before it is scheduled to end brings rancor that has nothing to do with the content. Some may want to just get along. Others believe that the process is working so nothing needs to change.

Yet if you ask leaders they will tell you "it's working" is destructive, even if they subtly invoke it.

Though there is concern about inequality in outcomes when it comes to medicine, how much is due to lifestyle choices and the co-morbidities they bring and if any is prejudice by care providers is unclear.

Yet data can inform smaller populations. And an analysis of women with the SARS-CoV-2 infection who gave birth at two hospitals in northern Manhattan during the height of New York City's COVID-19 pandemic, the national epicenter, did not find a difference in impact on obstetric complications and symptoms of COVID-19 in different groups of women, regardless of income, race or ethnicity. 

Leeches are found on every continent in freshwater habitats where there is little flow. They are popular bait for fishing, and doctors continue to use them in medical treatments. Environmentalists have even been using them to advance their beliefs that trace levels of "endocrine disrupting" chemicals are harmful.