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It was easy to make a strong adhesive in the Stone Age so claims about the presence of glue 50,000 years ago meaning higher intelligence for "Neanderthals" don't stick very well.Neanderthals and other early humans produced a tarry glue from birch bark to make tools and because modern anthropologists think birch tar could only be created through a complex process in which the bark had to be heated in the absence of air, they used that as proof of a high level of cognitive and cultural development. But a new study shows that there is a very simple way to make the glue.

At our English boarding school in the 1990s, my friends and I would spend hours immersed in roleplaying games. Our favourite was Vampire: The Masquerade, and I can well remember experiencing a kind of psychological hangover after spending an afternoon in the character of a ruthless undead villain. It took a while to shake off the fantasy persona, during which time I had to make a conscious effort to keep my manners and morals in check, so as not to get myself into some real world trouble.

Though plant burgers like Beyond and Impossible have surged in popularity, they are still alternative versions of the real thing. Science has been consistently pushing toward real meat, but grown in a lab, which should defuse activist claims about the meat industry without forcing people to settle for substitutes.The challenges are doing so at a reasonable cost and having it feel like real meat. 

Snus, a smokeless tobacco popular in Sweden, has led to a dramatic reduction in smoking-related diseases compared to the rest of Europe. But though it has been legal for sale in the U.S. since 2015, it was not legal to claim it is less harmful than cigarettes. After analyzing decades of evidence, FDA has agreed that these products are safer than cigarettes and has granted its first-ever modified risk orders to eight of their smokeless tobacco products.

Fresh off poisoning thousands by introducing tainted, illegal additives into vaping devices (including dangerous synthetic marijuana, which just resulted in a conviction), the marijuana supplement industry (cannabidiol, CBD) is under scrutiny again. This time it is Rooted Apothecary LLC, of Naples, Florida, for illegally selling unapproved products containing cannabidiol with unsubstantiated claims that the products treat teething pain and ear aches in infants, autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as well as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, among other conditions or diseases.

In India, farming is being held back by the efforts of activists like philosopher Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., who charge $40,000 per speech to tell Western audiences that more science in their country is bad. Experts argue just the opposite, it is instead activism holding India back that has made farmers less able to to compete in a global market. 

There is a war on opioids and legitimate pain patients have been caught in the stigma of recreational abuse. High-profile class action lawsuits against drug manufacturers are going to create an "icy chill" for pain medication just as they ran antibiotics out of the country.

A new paper finds that instead of leading to more honest replies, presumably because people don't think about the response, time pressure questions actually increase the likelihood of socially desirable answers over honest ones.There’s a longstanding belief in the field of psychology that limiting the time subjects have to respond to questions will result in more honest answers. Certainly, many of us who have participated in personality tests have heard the directive to “say the first thing that comes to mind.”  However, a recent study demonstrates that the quickest answer — especially if it is not the most socially desirable — still may not be the most truthful one.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Eli Lilly and Company's Reyvow (lasmiditan) tablets for acute treatment of migraine headaches in adults. Though used colloquially by everyone who feels like their headache is bad, a clinical migraine is an intense throbbing or pulsing pain in one area of the head that often brings nausea and sensitivity to light and sound. The effectiveness of Reyvow for the acute treatment of migraine was demonstrated in two randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials. A total of 3,177 adult patients with a history of migraine with and without aura treated a migraine attack with Reyvow in these studies.

Wind tunnel experiments to determine the role of asymmetry caused by the orientation of a volleyball on its aerodynamic characteristics found that it would be easy to make a volleyball more predictable; with a hexagonal or dimpled pattern instead of six panels, each made with three parallel rectangular strips - but that would eliminate some of the fun.Aerodynamics, the behavior of air as it flows around objects, plays a huge role in volleyball, golf, baseball, tennis, and soccer.  Aerodynamics is why soccer players like David Beckham could "bend" kicks into the goal, and why baseball pitchers throw knuckleballs that can dance around an opposing player's bat. 

Self-driving cars are the future. Some day our grandchildren will look back on today and be baffled that we ever debated about whether or not to save hundreds of thousands of lives per year.Yet crashes will still happen, and there is a debate about how those will be handled. Right now, automobile deaths that don't start off as heavily risky (drunk, high) involve a great deal of bad luck and perhaps a modicum of skill. Artificial intelligence tasked with deciding what to do as an accident occurs will have to get socialist about it, according to a new paper; choosing the course of action that will help the many at the expense of the few.

The belief that scientists should be dispassionate observers and neutral resources for the public good is dangerously misguided, argue marine biologists in a Science letter. Environmentalists feel pain when they see destruction of nature and should be allowed to cry, write Gordon, Radford, and Simpson, because that grief and post-traumatic recovery can strengthen resolve and inspire scientific creativity.