Barometric pressure, tides, winds, waves, they all play a role in the ebb and flow of the ocean. A new study finds that that river outflow could play a role in sea level change as well. 

By examining decades' worth of river level and tidal data from gauges installed throughout the eastern United States. and combining that data with information on water density, salinity, and the Earth's rotation, they created a mathematical model that describes the link between river discharge and sea level on an annual basis.

The oldest colors in the geological record have been discovered. At 1.1 billion-years-old, the bright pink pigments extracted from marine black shales of the Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania, West Africa, are actually molecular fossils of chlorophyll that were produced by ancient photosynthetic organisms - cyanobacteria.

The fossils range from blood red to deep purple in their concentrated form, and bright pink when diluted and are more than half a billion years older than previous pigment discoveries. The rocks deep beneath the Sahara desert in Africa, remnants of an ancient ocean that has long since vanished, were rocks to powder (yes, you read that right, but nature has a lot more) before extracting and analyzing molecules of ancient organisms from them.

There has been recent concern about the impact of vaping flavors on young people but the numbers are fuzzy. The US FDA has rightly cracked down on companies flagrantly violating copyright in packaging but cartoon characters don't lead young people to vaping. Instead, former smokers note, young people who experiment with it but don't already smoke often just want to seem cool, and there is nothing cool about bubble gum flavor.

Physicians who work in small, independent primary care practices, offices with five or fewer physicians, report dramatically lower levels of burnout than the national average, according to survey results published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.

The findings indicate that the independence and sense of autonomy that doctors have in small practices may provide some protection against symptoms of burnout. Whether that feeling of autonomy will last as health care becomes more centralized is another issue, but for now 13.5 percent reporting being burned out in smaller practices versus 54.4 percent at large ones.

While churnalism sites like Gizmodo manufacture culture wars in order to promote fear and doubt about American science and medicine. China is engaging in actual risky behavior with no media attention from clickbait sites. 

If you want to understand the spread of antibiotic resistance across Europe, sexually transmitted diseases seem to be a decent barometer.

Gonorrhea, caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae, is the second most prevalent bacterial sexually transmitted disease globally. The WHO estimates that Gonorrhea infects 88 million people globally each year. Amongst other complications, it can cause pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility if left untreated, and in some cases leads to life-threatening complications such as meningitis. Transmitted during unprotected sex, many strains of Gonorrhea are now difficult to treat due to the rise in antibiotic resistance.