Ten years ago science journalists talked about functional MRI (fMRI) scans all of the time. Because if a part of the brain lit up when someone did, said, or read something, it went into a paper. Few asked who was doing the interpreting, how legitimate the scale was, and if it had any scientific relevance. We got media claims that fMRI would predict behavior and the resulting media attention caused scholars to rush to produce even more fMRI papers.

Cover crops are touted for their soil and water quality related benefits. A new paper found that incorporating cover crops with tillage results in increased cover crop decomposition rates and increased mineralization of nutrients from cover crop biomass.

Other studies have reported mixed results for corn-soybean grain yields when planted after cover crops.

A new paper uses a combination of cosmic voids – large expanding bubbles of space containing very few galaxies – and the faint imprint of sound waves in the very early Universe, known as baryon acoustic oscillations, that can be seen in the distribution of galaxies, to show how large structures in the distribution of galaxies in the Universe can provide the most precise tests of dark energy and cosmic expansion yet.

Though "energy medicine" and "oxygenated herbs" promoted by CNN's Chris Cuomo are woo, one notion ridiculed by journalists has merit; using light to disinfect areas and kill coronavirus.

Though chemicals are most common, they are not always practical or portable. Ultraviolet radiation in the 200 to 300 nanometer range will destroy the virus, it just requires UV radiation sources that emit sufficiently high doses of UV light. Current devices are things like expensive mercury-containing gas discharge lamps, which require high power, have a relatively short lifetime, and are bulky. 

A new paper posits that fluctuating estrogen levels may make alcohol more rewarding.

The giant caveat is that the study was in mice, and despite what you may read in corporate media, mice are not little people, so this research is firmly in the "exploratory" part of science. 

We know dogs will try to rescue humans, those Lassie stories were based on events that have happened for as long as humans and dogs have co-existed, but simply observing dogs rescuing someone doesn't tell you much about dogs' actual interest in rescuing humans

So psychologists at Arizona State University set up an experiment assessing 60 pet dogs' propensity to rescue their owners. None of the dogs had any kind of rescue training.