Police know that when a mysterious death of a married woman or man occurs, look at the spouse first. That apparently applies to beekeepers too. A lot has been made of colony collapse disorder and despite science studies showing it can't be the modern neonicotinoids that were invented to replace pesticides the last time they were blamed for bee deaths, activist groups have made a lot of money and gotten a lot of press promoting that bees are dying due to chemical corporations. 

We already knew that environmental groups had a wage gap for men and women reminiscent of the 1960s while engineering, which supposedly needs more women, leads all job sectors in equal pay between genders. 

Big Data And The Internet Of Things are all the rage, to such an extent they have become anything people want them to mean - they are becoming Smurfs of the technology lexicon. 

Luke-Kristopher Davis. Credit: wales OnlineCollege students in a porn film? Nothing special about that.Actually, it is when the college student is a man. Adult films are all about hot young women but it's not easy breaking in if you are a guy. Usually it happens because you show up with a hot young woman.Brainbox Swansea University physics student Luke-Kristopher Davis was on holiday in Barcelona when he was approached by director Erika Lust. Lust says she and her firm XConfessions are pioneers of so-called “feminist porn.”

Green Mountain College students care so much about the environment and freedom of choice they have forced a ban on bottled water on the Poultney campus."The more we buy and sell bottled water, the more we engage in a culture of treating water as a commodity, incentivizing businesses to extract it from the ground in one community and selling it elsewhere, with little benefit to the people or ecosystem in the community from which the water was extracted," says the College's sustainability coordinator Aaron Witham.

I was not on the Nate Silver fan train the way many people are, I thought it was wishy-washy to predict a presidential race with 68 percent confidence in October of 2012 when I called it 100 percent in July. His stats averaging led him to be no more accurate than a European betting service using nothing but money and every other statistical modeler was correct also, so technically he was nothing special. In this segment, he was latched onto by people who were just looking for new ways to affirm their political bias, a common plight among science media.

While the University of Texas at Austin spends a lot of money in court defending racism in its college admissions policies, Big Data may help solve the real problem in colleges: not who they exclude in their secret admissions sauce but the two-thirds of freshmen students that will not graduate because admission department methods are trapped in the past.

Impact factor, the relative authority of a journal based on article quality, is maligned by people who can't get into top-tier publications but though it was originally created to help libraries know which journals are worth paying for, articles in high impact factor journals are now considered a barometer of quality for government funding agencies, who can't be tasked with analyzing the merits and editorial policies of 25,000 different publications.

Yelp, a local business review site, has released an updated API which increases the number of data calls to 25,000 per day, a big switch from an earlier 100 cap. And it's free. Why the change of heart? They have been burned in the past, notably by Google, which used Yelp review content without attributing it. but they seem to no longer be afraid a competitor will scrape its data and grow larger. 

New York environmental activists, including those employed by the state of New York, said Indian Point nuclear power plant should close for 42 days this summer to protect fish.Since New York is already concerned about brownouts and blackouts, closing a reliable source of clean energy is one of the stranger environmental plans this year. Nuclear plants recycle water, of course, and environmentalists are worried fish will die in warm water. Engineers proposed putting up screens to keep fish away but that made too much sense for the Department of Environmental Conservation, which thinks overpaying for fracking-derived energy from neighboring Pennsylvania at high spot market prices is better for its citizens when they run out of electricity.