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In a new short paper in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, Roger A. Søraa from Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and co-authors Eduard Fosch-Villaronga from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and Adam Poulsen from Charles Sturt University in Australia discuss what a queering of robots might entail.They point out that technology is not developed in a vacuum, but instead reflects biases and reproduces societal values and beliefs.

A primitive bee from 100 million years ago has two things in common with bees of today; pollen and a parasite that caused its demise, much like varroa mites cause periodic colony collapse disorder today.The mid-Cretaceous fossil from Myanmar provides the first record of a primitive bee with pollen and also the first record of the beetle parasites, which continue to show up on modern bees today. Beetle parasites may have caused the flight error that was deadly for the insect. The Discoscapa apicula specimen became stuck in tree resin and thus preserved in amber, and has now been identified as a new family, genus and species. The new find has been classified as Discoscapa apicula, in the family Discoscapidae. 

An article in Manufacturing&Service Operations Management says that an increase in the number of stores directly decreases consumer waste. The reason is improved access to groceries which would men better distribution of inventory and price competition. Food waste is a big problem in all developed countries; Europe became a joke in the previous decade when they set out to ban sales of 'ugly' food. In the U.S., the Department of Agriculture estimates food waste at between 30-40 percent of the food supply.

Much has been made of Chinese student achievement test scores, but inconvenient confounders are often ignored, such as that Chinese learn by rote. No teach in America wants to do that. Teachers are poorly paid and clean their own toilets.And only elite kids take the tests. The non-elites were overwhelmingly decimated by China's one-child policy, a totalitarian government mandate enacted in 1979 to reduce the population until agriculture could catch up. However, it closed the education gap, at least for those not born illegally. And for those women who weren't aborted by government decree. 

Results from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), using data collected from annual questionnaires from 2014 to 2018, finds that rates of skin cancer were higher among gay and bisexual men compared to heterosexual men but lower among bisexual women than heterosexual women. 

Beliefs that tumors are caused by the modern world's food and chemicals have suffered a setback. A 60-million-year setback.The fossilized tail of a young dinosaur from in southern Alberta, Canada had the benign tumor as part of the pathology of LCH (Langerhans cell histiocytosis), a rare and sometimes painful disease that still afflicts humans, particularly kids.

Do you listen to experts when it comes to food? If so, you are in the rarity. Most mimic what their friends do, according to recent survey results.Study participants ate an extra fifth of a portion of fruit and vegetables for every portion they thought their social media peers ate - and they consumed an extra portion of snack foods and sugary drinks for every three portions they believed their online social circles did. So our friends determine our eating behavior? Or do we tend to be friends with people who have our lifestyles? And what might that mean for government panels that want to nudge the behavior of the public? Will we see targeted ad campaigns at key social media users?

An experiment before the 2016 Trump-Clinton debate in metropolitan New York City showed that it was possible to have people be less polarized. They showed questionnaire responses where respondents were actually more moderate than their real responses, and then people justified their moderation.Posing as political researchers, a research team from McGill and Lund Universities approached 136 voters at the first Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton presidential debate, on Long Island, and asked them to compare Trump and Clinton on various leadership traits (such as courage, vision, and analytic skills) by putting an X on a sliding scale. 

NGC 4490, nicknamed the "Cocoon Galaxy" because of its shape, has "a clear double nucleus structure," according to a new paper.It's only realized now because while one nucleus can be seen in optical wavelengths, the other is hidden in dust and can only be seen in infrared and radio wavelengths.The work started when first author Allen Lawrence was taking undergraduate astronomy classes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He had the chance to study one of two galaxy systems and picked NGC 4490, which is interacting with a smaller galaxy, NGC 4485. The system is about 20 percent of the size of the Milky Way, located in the Northern Hemisphere and about 30 million light years from Earth.

It doesn't seem like it if you watch political news but humans are unusually cooperative. We are unique in that we often cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers. Nurses, firefighters, helping someone who dropped a package, standing in line, there is no natural selection benefit to that. In a natural selection-dominated world, the cheats, nepotists, and cronies would always win but unlike most of the animal kingdom, those behaviors are considered deviant.Why do we cooperate? Language, intelligence, religion, the desire to hunt large game, there is no shortage of speculation about why we became Apex Cooperators. 

Neanderthal DNA sequences are more common in modern Africans than previously known, and different non-African populations have levels of Neanderthal ancestry surprisingly similar to each other, according to a new study in Cell. Researchers arrived at these findings by developing a new statistical method, called IBDmix, to identify Neanderthal sequences in the genomes of modern humans. The results also suggest that African genomes contain Neanderthal sequences in part due to back-migration of ancestors of present-day Europeans. 

Sometimes bees die off in large groups. Since the first beekeeping recorded in history, in the 10th century, there have been documented cases where entire hives perished. Some blamed bad bee husbandry, some blamed weather, and then in recent cases some tried to blame pesticides.