It used to be that women lived a comfortable length longer than men. That gap has closed and men's life spans have increased more than women recently; 4.6 years for men since 1989 and 2.7 years for women, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

Amanda Fiegl at National Geographic says that this is alarming - a "troubling trend" that men live almost as long as women and blames inadequate health care for why women have not continued to unfairly live much longer than men. It's almost like that old saw about the Washington Post - 'World Destroyed: Women, Minorities Impacted Most'.

It's not news if it is positive for men.

Media and politicians have focused on one common denominator in the shooting sprees that have occurred during the last few years; guns. What they leave out is that every instance also had shooters on psychiatric medication.

Diagnoses of serious psychological and psychiatric disorders have skyrocketed alongside the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders' expanding list of what constitutes mental illness. Example: The frequency of bipolar disorder in children, which has jumped 40-fold in the last two decades - though you could also get similar results for ADD and even being 'on the spectrum' of autism as those caught media attention.

If you are anything like me, you were surprised that the LHC announced a 5-sigma result for the Higgs boson last July.  Not because it wasn't there - it clearly was - but because usually physicists are really, really conservative in their claims. While astronomers start every press release with 'may mean life on other planets' and biologists love to invoke missing links ten times a year, experimental physicists play things pretty close to the vest.

A year ago, raw milk believers thought the Indiana General Assembly was going to allow raw milk to be sold in the state - instead they got a new requirement that raw milk be labeled as “not for human consumption.”

The Indiana Board of Animal Health (BOAH) asked for the agricultural board to study raw milk and instead of banning it, came up with health requirements for it to be allowed.  If a health requirement is in place it will never pass. Even a bill that would have allowed raw milk to be distributed to family members and non-paying guests died in committee.

So if you want a safe place to drink milk, you know where to go. New Mexico is backing out of its agreement to allow raw milk sales. Wisconsin, the largest dairy producer, also does not allow it.

You can guess the age of gently declining intellects by what Doomsday scenarios they embrace. 

It's the friendship paradox. Studies of offline social networks show a trend very similar to the online kind - we each have fewer friends than most of our friends have, the same as almost everyone we know.

An analysis of Facebook’s active users, 721 million people then, and its 69 billion interweaving friendships, found that a user’s friend count was less than the average friend count of his or her friends 93 percent of the time. Averaged across Facebook as a whole, users had an average of 190 friends, while their friends averaged 635 friends of their own.

Other than simple curiosity about our ancestors, why do we care whether an adult from 4,000 years ago could drink milk without getting a stomachache? The answers could change our ideas about the speed at which our evolution has occurred and if we are stuck with ancient genes and ancient bodies in a modern environment.

It's reasonable to speculate that humans aren't suited to our modern lives, and that our health, our family lives, and perhaps our sanity would all be improved if we could live the way early humans did. Our bodies may have been better suited to how we spent the first 99% of our existence, the claim goes. In short, we have what the anthropologist Leslie Aiello, president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, called "paleofantasies."

Turkey is the most secular of the Muslim countries in the world - some women wear headscarves (hijab), some do not. They are optional.

So when Turkish astrophysicst Rennan Pekünlü, who teaches at Ege University in Izmir, told women they could not wear headscarves in his classroom, he was bought up on criminal charges after a woman complained. He was found guilty of violating the freedoms and rights of women at the university.  He argued that he was upholding the Turkish constitution, which prohibits the display of religious symbols or affiliation in government offices and institutions supported by government funding. He was also found to be taking pictures of women who entered wearing headscarves, which is a cultural no-no, but he said he had permission. 

"In sharp contrast to past Canadian practice and current U.S. Government practice, the federal government has recently made efforts to prevent the media and the general public from speaking to government scientists,” Tyler Sommers, coordinator of Democracy Watch, wrote in a statement about a complaint they filed Wednesday, citing Canada's Access to Information Act.