It's that time of year again. The days are shorter and nights are colder and with that comes people blaming bad moods and symptoms of depression on the decreased amount of daylight, saying, “Oh, I have Seasonal Affective Disorder.”

Do they?

The planet's largest carbon reservoir is not in permafrost or the Amazon rainforest, it is hidden in the Earth's inner core, according to what the authors of a new study in PNAS call a "provocative and speculative" finding. 

As much as two-thirds of Earth's carbon. They suggest that iron carbide, Fe7C3, provides a good match for the density and sound velocities of Earth's inner core under the relevant conditions. The model, if correct, could help resolve observations that have puzzled researchers for decades but they are not claiming it is more than it is.

In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue computer beat Garry Kasparov at chess. He had won their first encounter in 1996, with 3 wins, 1 loss and 2 draws (4-2), so the team of programmers and chess experts tweaked the program and in 1997 came out ahead 3.5-2.5, a big achievement for programming because chess is 'creative'.

Another creative task even more relevant to scientists than chess is extracting data from scientific publications to create a database cataloging results from tens of thousands of individual studies. It sounds like it would be easy but much of cataloging would ordinarily be placed in the 'subjective' camp. 

Relational aggression, such as malicious rumors, social exclusion and rejection, are considered something that girls do more often. The movie "Mean Girls" epitomized it to hilarious effect. A trio of scholars used surveys to show that boys are being shortchanged in popular accounts of mean-ness.

620 randomly selected sixth graders were followed through their senior year, filling out an annual survey talking about victimization. Using group-based trajectory modeling the female co-authors determined that boys are actually meaner than girls - or at least they brag about it more on surveys. Boys were more often to call themselves relational aggression perpetrators while girls reported being victims more.

In epidemiology, matching curves are often enough to imply causation and so it is often done, even if there is no evidence to warrant the link.

There has been an increased use of antibiotics and there are an increased number of diagnoses so some epidemiologists looked at those two curves in the same direction and suggested one may be causing the other. A new analysis of about 500,000 children published in BMJ dismisses those claims and finds that exposure to antibiotics during pregnancy or early in life does not appear to increase the risk of asthma. 

Imagine a car that can't get dirty or a business in Ferguson, Missouri that can't be graffiti'ed by unhinged protesters.

It might be possible with a new class of highly fluorinated super-repellent polymer called a “fluoropore”, which mimics the natural ability of lotus plants and cabbage leaves to make water droplets simply roll away - but for oils too. This lotus effect has been used for producing rough surfaces with special chemical properties. “However, this trick does not work for oils – the lotus plant repels water, but no oil,” says Dr.-Ing. Bastian Rapp of the KIT Institute of Microstructure Technology. “Oil-repellent surfaces need to have another chemical structure, fluoropolymers, for this purpose.”