Mars is no vacation paradise. The temperatures fluctuate dramatically and average minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The surface is red dust punctuated by craters, canyons, and volcanoes. On the plus side, the atmosphere is extremely thin, comprising only about 1% of the density of Earth’s, and gravity is 60 percent lower, so you can finally dunk a basketball.

With all of those challenges, Martian landers have still been able capture wind measurements — some gauging the cooling rate of heated materials when winds blow over them, others using cameras to image “tell-tales” that blow in the wind. Both anemometric methods have yielded valuable insight into the planet’s climate and atmosphere.

If humans ever intend to go there, we'll need more data first.

Alcohol is the best-marketed carcinogen out there. Cigarettes and obesity only wish they were able to devote the money to positive imaging that alcohol, one of the top three lifestyle killers, receives. Instead, governments devote billions to education and awareness of those two while the only tepid warning about alcohol is not to drive after you roll the dice on cancer.

When it comes to BPA, PFAS, or weedkillers, government epidemiologists say any presence should be considered pathological but say nothing at all about alcohol use despite it being scientifically shown, unlike most epidemiology, and addictive.

Every country has people claiming to be native now, whereas in previous generations if you were born there, you were native. In reality, outside the cradle in Africa, no one is native.

Everyone was an immigrant, and over time everyone calling themselves native to an area now stole land from someone else and colonized it. It's impossible to know who were the first to arrive but science can use inference, and new evidence of human occupation in southeast Indonesia dating back 42,000 years provides some idea of the time and the route taken by some of the first humans to arrive in Australia.

Misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories have always been with us. The belief that Republican Vice-President Dan Quayle couldn't spell 'potato' or that Democratic President Barack Obama was not a citizen are common modern ones that still get repeated as facts.

A recent paper did something interesting with data from 100 hypertension trials around the world - it compared blood pressure reductions by the type of healthcare professionals who led the interventions.

The results were that pharmacists achieved the greatest improvements, followed by community health workers. The authors believe that, unlike in the government-controlled medical environment, especially if patients are subsidized or free under the Affordable Care Act, doctors and nurses don't spend much time, while pharmacists and community health care workers have calmer, more empathetic demeanors.

A new analysis has found that cirrhosis, a liver disease that occurs when scar tissue prevents the liver from functioning normally, occurs twice as often in trans adults as those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.