Cathy O'Neil at Mathbabe.org says she has evidence that betting on people could be in the works; data broker Acxiom is letting people see their warehoused data and another attempt at creating 'stocks' for celebrity athletes and such.

Alejandro Jodorowsky, a cult Franco-Chilean film-maker (an "acid western" - so think back to 1970 and picture that) and science-fiction comics writer who later became a spiritual guru (psycho-shamanism - just jumble together tarot cards, alchemy and Zen Buddhism together), has been honored by The Minor Planets Centre, a branch of the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

They have listed asteroid 261690 Jodorowsky at the request of the French astronomer who spotted the five-kilometer-wide object almost eight years ago. 261690 Jodorowsky orbits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, at an average distance of 470 million kilometres from the sun.

William Stein, an associate professor of mathematics at University of Washington, has taken his advocacy of free open-source mathematics software to the next level. 

Stein is the director of the SAGE Project and this new web-based LaTeX editor is client-side CoffeeScript, HTML, and CSS. It's free, it's unlimited!

Check it out at the SageMath Cloud.

In April of last year, two Jordanians died of a mysterious respiratory illness, followed by another man with similar symptoms in Saudi Arabia. Scientists and public health experts were surprised to identify the cause as a novel coronavirus, like the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2002, that had been caused by a coronavirus that originated in China. 

A writer at Breitbart has referenced a study done by Harvard in 2007 debunking the claim that banning firearms would reduce murder or even suicide.

Suicide is the far and away leader in handgun deaths while rifles, including the confusingly-termed 'assault' kind, are barely a blip in murders or suicides, a few hundred per year.

This sort of analysis has been done multiple times and get done each time a shooting tragedy happens. When 'shooting sprees' were blamed on American gun culture last year, it was quickly noted that the rate of shooting sprees in countries where guns are outlawed are not lower.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are called new innovation so disruptive for academia today that they will do to higher education what the Internet has done to newspapers or what Napster did to music. There's only one problem with this bold hypothesis: It's simply not true.

MOOCs are not a transformative innovation that will forever remake academia. That honor belongs to a more disruptive and far-reaching innovation – "big data," a catchall phrase that refers to the vast numbers of data sets that are collected daily, big data promises to revolutionize online learning. Big data in the online learning space will give institutions the predictive tools they need to improve learning outcomes for individual students.

Since the dawn of time [citation needed], mathematicians have been fascinated with what prime numbers are, how many there are (see below), tests for primality, and crucially, finding a pattern in which numbers are prime and which aren’t. So far, the answer to that one has eluded us.

I don’t think it’s too much of an overstatement to say that prime numbers are the building blocks of numbers. They’re the atoms of maths. They are the beginning of all number theory...

Open Season: Prime Numbers (Part 1) By Katie Steckles Aperiodical.com

During the days of rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan, the military decided to try a science approach to working with the residents there.

Unfortunately, they picked an American anthropology field that is at war with itself over whether or not it wants to be scientific or advocacy-based. It was the wrong solution at the wrong time - as Israeli leaders have long told American presidents when being patronized, the Middle East is not the Middle West.

In the ongoing culture war, where various groups jockey over studies to create some confirmation bias for their readers, some of the silliest claims have been that there may be brain differences between 'conservative' and 'liberal' people.

Never mind that this would have to mean Americans have evolved to be a separate species, engendering all kinds of supernatural epigenetic and logical backflips, the reason it casts doubt is that all those studies claiming to be science used fMRI and/or surveys of college students to bastardize biology.