Miami is now a very scary place to be, and Zika is the reason. Health authorities are taking the matter seriously. They are spraying a very toxic insecticide from planes. Sometimes tough times call for tough measures, and this is one of them.

Traditionally, science has been a refuge from this hyperbolic nonsense. But no longer. More and more scientific journals are wading into partisan politics. Current Biology, in its most recent issue, has published a feature article that is every bit as ghastly as it is incoherent.

Great frigatebirds seem to defy the rules of gravity, and now they are redefining basic physiology. To understand how birds who remain in flight for weeks at a time also sleep, scientists recorded their brain activity with surprising results. They were found to not only sleep one hemisphere at a time, but even more surprisingly both hemispheres of the brain slept simultaneously -- while in flight.

In Cambodia and other parts of Southeast Asia, infantile beriberi is a public health concern. If not arrested it can be fatal. If a pregnant woman consumes a diet deficient in thiamine, her breast milk will not supply enough to her baby to prevent beriberi. A possible means of ameliorating this situation is to fortify a commonly-consumed food with thiamine.

As we wrote recently a number of Olympians swear by "cupping therapy," which they claim allows them to recover from injury and overcome muscle soreness more quickly. Although it's a bunch of nonsense, it still may have room for improvement.

In December 1912, Charles Dawson, an amateur antiquarian and solicitor archaeologist, presented part of a human-like skull to the world, claiming it was the “missing link” between ape and human. However, new dating technologies in the 1950s revealed that these bones were nowhere near old enough to make up such a link. But now new evidence points the finger of suspicion even more firmly at Dawson, and suggests a sole hoaxer was responsible.

You wouldn’t want to be cared for by a doctor who doesn’t wash his or her hands. You wouldn’t want to be operated on with instruments that weren’t sterilized? So why would you want to be treated by a doctor wearing a white coat that hasn’t been washed in a week? Many white coats are covered in bacteria like MRSA -– and they are dirty. So it’s time to hang them up for good.

A new nanostructured material selectively destroys bacteria, while leaving eukaryotic cells alone. Antibacterial surfaces such as this are needed for medical devices.

Here'e to appreciating how, through precisely-calibrated nutrition, these extraordinary Olympic athletes become powerhouses of performance. Aside from their sport-specific training, it can be argued that Team USA is only Team USA because of the U.S.O.C's Sport Nutrition Team, which puts the right food on the training table and guides each athlete through their individualized schedule of consumption.

The 1938 Code of Federal Regulations was created because of companies like Hampton Creek. The government wanted to give the public confidence that a company wasn't just slapping the name of a famous food on a jar -- a jar which may not contain that thing at all.