Its not a great idea to use surveys, but sometimes those are all we have. After environmental groups drummed up publicity about a colony collapse disorder in honeybees, for example, concerned amateurs began taking up beekeeping. Since nature is not a perfect system, and the new folks didn't know what they were doing, these amateurs killed off a lot of bees, but there is no checkbox on the survey for that, so they blamed pesticides.

Declaring things endangered, even species that were only just discovered, is good for business, and a species of hummingbird has been added to conservation watchlists and global warming has been blamed - except it isn't endangered, it's instead migratory. 

In Insectivorous Plants, Sir Charles Darwin pondered carnivorous plants. They live in habitats poor in nutrients, mostly on nitrogen and phosphorous, and have compensated this lack with the ability to digest animals such as insects and other arthropods.

Adapting and surviving with a carnivorous diet in nutrient-poor soils is an evolutionary process that some evolutionary unrelated species have been going through, repeatedly and independently, from the same set of genes and proteins, according to a new study in Nature Ecology&Evolution.

In dating, at least the online kind, younger people tend to have a hard line on educational matching, but older people feel like that's less important.

Recently, two armies were pitted against each other, with harpoon-like appendages covered in poison. They went two war, stabbing each other and rupturing victims like water balloons.

It was all mathematically predictable, at least over time. In a one-off scenario, Tom Brady and the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl, though in over 90 other instances where a team in the playoffs was down by 19 after three quarters, they lost. Knowing the math could lead to new, targeted therapies to fight infections.

But dueling bacteria would not be the infectors in that scenario; they'd be the remedy.

Between 2012 and 2015, the number of chemical burns to the eye associated with laundry detergent pods increased more than 30-fold among preschool-aged children in the US, according to a new analysis, but don't fall prey to the scaremongering that will be done by CNN and PBS.

Detergent pods are dissolvable pouches containing enough laundry detergent for a single use - they lead to less waste because  the amount used is precise. That's good for the environment. But harried parents are being given one more thing to be terrified about, and academics are blaming "candy-like appearance."

Young patients with acute lymphocytic leukemia, the most common type of pediatric cancer, are likely to report that they adhered to their anti-cancer medication better than they really did.

And so do their parents.

Studies show that over 95 percent of prescribed doses must be taken to be effective but a new analysis instead finds that that 84 percent of patients or their parents over-reported adherence to a regimen of the oral maintenance therapy6-mercaptopurine (6MP), which is prescribed for two years after chemotherapy for patients to achieve durable remissions.