Scientists continue to gain ground in the race against wheat stem rust, a pathogen that threatens global food security because of its ability to kill wheat. The new chink in nature's armor was discovered in the first rust virulence molecule that wheat plants detect to 'switch on' built-in resistance and stave off the disease.

Dog owners insist that 'all dogs are puppies', which means our beliefs about their cuteness are not conditional on age, but a paper in Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People and Animals, suggests otherwise. The authors found that dogs' attractiveness to humans peaks at roughly eight weeks, the same point in time at which their mother weans them and leaves them to fend for themselves.

To many in the west, Siberia is synonymous with remote winter gulags where dissidents go to die. A new simulation estimates that if climate change occurs according to more aggressive models, the end of the century might see it as a pretty nice place to love. Russia east of the Urals towards the Pacific accounts for 77 percent of Russia's land area - 13 million square kilometers. Its population, however, is just 27 percent and is concentrated along the forest-steppe in the south, which has a comfortable climate and fertile soil. 

There are lots of paradoxes in nature but one - how earthquakes along mid-ocean ridges are linked with low tides - may have revealed a mechanism.

The mechanism is the magma below the mid-ocean ridges.

"It's the magma chamber breathing, expanding and contracting due to the tides, that's making the faults move," says Christopher Scholz, a seismologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Low tide correlation to earthquakes is surprising because of the way the mid-ocean fault moves. The fault as a tilted plane that separates two blocks of earth. During movement, the upper block slides down with respect to the lower one.

Though the U.S. government and its hand-picked panel are claiming that the "opioid epidemic" is legitimate pain patients getting hooked on drugs because of lazy doctors and greedy pharmaceutical companies, the reality is much different. Only a small number of people considered addicted to opiods are not instead recreational users.

The movie version of scientists is a lone scientist having a "Eureka!" moment in a laboratory - thanks, Archimedes. In modern times, for example, ecoterrorists attack because humanity is a plague, science creates a cure, we are saved, or a scientist is a myopic tinkerer who creates a virus and government wants to weaponize it, etc.(1)