Forensic science does not prove guilt or innocence. It never has and it never will.

The next time you hear about DNA evidence, for example, proving the guilt or innocence of a suspect in a violent crime, rest assured that you are being misinformed. In courts of law, attorneys do the proving, not science.

Science, after all, has no real value until a human being can use it to solve a problem or answer a question of importance. People prove things; science provides help. Yes, science may exist to provide some clarity in support of or in contradiction to an argument, but science itself does not make arguments.

An exploratory study in cell cultures and mice finds that in their rodents high-fat diets throughout pregnancy (rich in polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acids) impacted fetal brain development. 

Don’t be alarmed, mice are not little people so a mouse study can only ever disqualify an effect, it can never show one in humans. Mice studies (and epidemiology) are termed "exploratory" because they can only suggest a link and will need relevant study before they can relate to humans, regardless what Huffington Post or Guardian may forget to note in their articles.

Right now all our missions to Mars are sterilized to protect it from any Earth life that could hitch a ride and confuse the searches. A report by the “Planetary Protection Independent Review Board” recommends that NASA treats most of Mars similarly to the Moon for planetary protection. It comes with a cover letter from NASA recommending to their planetary protection officer that they implement the proposal. This would be fine if Mars was like the Moon.

Last month in Korea a computer scientist struck up a conversation on the subway. He told me in fractured English that he wants to take a PhD in theology. When I meet a theologian I usually ask, “Theoretical, or experimental?” This guy wouldn’t have understood, so I forbore. I did suggest, tongue in cheek, that he would then be uniquely qualified to determine whether A.I.s have souls.

“More than that,” he said, taking me seriously, “they could be intermediaries” between us and God. I allowed as that was an interesting notion.

When Dr. Scott Gottlieb  was named as head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the pro-science community cheered. Gottlieb had both academic and private sector experience, he had been both doctor and patient, and he had been a Deputy at FDA in the past so he knew where all the bottlenecks remained.

Myopia (nearsightedness) is the most frequent cause of correctable visual impairment worldwide.  It occurs when the eye grows too long from front to back (axial length). Instead of focusing images on the retina, images are focused at a point in front of the retina. As a result, people with myopia have good near vision, but poor distance vision that can be corrected with glasses or contact lenses. 

Now kids 8-12 have a new option that has been show to slow the progression of myopia at the initiation of treatment.

Last November 12 the city of Venice was flooded by the second-highest tide in recorded history. The sea level, pushed by 60 mph SE winds and intense rainfalls, surged to +187 cm above average, a mere 7cm less than the disastrous event of November 4 1966, which put the city and its surroundings to their knees.

YouTube creators are panicking as YouTube classifies their videos as directed towards kids when they are not. It's a dumb algorithm. It would classify this as a comic book probably.

A human would never classify this channel as for kids under 13:

Vivziepop

Communist dictatorships lack transparency, so if they don't want to be bound by the same ethical rules as everyone else, they won't be. Some in western countries gush about claims they make regarding solar power, for example, but only their CO2 emissions - highest in the world - can be verified from outside. 

It turns out their voluntary organ donation claims may be just as made up, and that is because the Chinese government is systematically misreporting data, according to new research.

A history of fraud and unethical behavior

Jem Bendell’s “Deep Adaptation” is scaring many people, sometimes referred to as "The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It's Sending People to Therapy"- yet - it is not a published paper. It is an unpublished draft that has been rejected for failing the minimum standards of an academic paper. It is written by a sociologist, not a climate scientist. As its main cite, it uses a blog post by a system analyst recording a talk he gave to a group of businessmen. When he submitted this draft to a journal, they requested major revisions because it didn’t meet the minimum standards for an academic paper.