The betting line created for this weekend's Super Bowl is done by very smart people. They are not trying to fool anyone, they want the betting to be as even as possible and they make their money on a 'commission' - the vigorish or 'vig' - from the winners. It's not like selling football jerseys, where more volume helps, they need losers to fund the winners so making the odds as even as possible is important.

To do that, they try to take into account everything - which player has a cold, the type of field, the weather, the wind. According to a new study, they may take into account a biological clock.

In 2013, President Obama threatened to shut down the government if Congress did not do what he wanted. Congress replied in kind and so we got The Sequester, where government functions were halted unless they were specially exempted. NASA and the National Science Foundation were shuttered, the Smithsonian Panda Cam was turned off, science was doomed - but while scuttling science the president kept 436 personal White House staffers were kept on the payroll as "essential".

Modern humans date back only about 200,000 years. How did that turn into the population of the planet and the extinction of Neanderthals? We have to leave the world of science to speculate on that but physical evidence does provide some guideposts.

Fossil records show that some anatomically modern human groups reached the Levantine corridor - the modern Middle East - as early as 100,000 years ago but genetic testing indicates that human populations inhabiting the globe today descended from a single group that migrated from Africa only 70,000 years ago. 30,000 years is a gigantic gap and there has been little evidence to bridge the contradictory hypotheses. 

We are all familiar with the following scenarios: a woman and a man are having a conversation. She is warm and friendly and clearly interested in the conversation. He interprets her behavior as sexual interest. Or she is warm and friendly and clearly interested in the conversation and he thinks she is just being friendly and then she wonders if he's gay.

Same behavior, different interpretations. 

Men and women misunderstand each other a lot and psychologists in the Department of Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) believe that we are built that way by biology and time - we have evolved to get the wrong idea about sexual interest.

Antioxidants are natural food ingredients that protect cells from harmful influences. Their main task is to neutralize so-called "free radicals" which are produced in the process of oxidation and which are responsible for cell degeneration.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, and the University of Lund, Sweden, now show that vinegar flies are able to detect these protective substances by using olfactory cues. Odors that are exclusively derived from antioxidants attract flies, increase feeding behavior and trigger oviposition in female flies.

Neonatal intestinal disorders that prevent infants from getting the nutrients they need may be caused by defects in the lysosomal system that occur before weaning, according to a new study. Lysosomes are cellular recycling centers responsible for breaking down all kinds of biological material.

The study in PLOS Genetics links lysosomal dysfunction with intestinal disorders for the first time, pointing to a previously unknown target for research and future therapies to help infants unable to absorb milk nutrients and gain weight, a diagnosis called failure to thrive.