Local govts support state-owned enterprises expanding hiring of graduates, expected to help alleviate unemployment pressure

Many localities have issued policies to encourage state-owned enterprises to play an exemplary role in stabilizing employment and expand recruitment of college graduates, with some provinces and cities requiring no less than half of the hiring quota at state-owned enterprises be dedicated to college graduates. The office of the Guangdong Provincial People's Government recently published ... Read more

New tyrannosaur bridges gap from medium to monstrous

A fossil from a new species of dinosaur is helping to bridge a crucial 20-million-year gap in tyrannosaur evolution. The key fossil is a 90-million-year-old, grapefruit-sized partial skull from Uzbekistan’s Bissekty Formation. This tyrannosaur braincase, the first well-preserved one found from the mid-Cretaceous period, shows that, although still small, tyrannosaurs of the time already had ... Read more

Five things to know about Zika

The mysteries of the Zika virus are slowly but surely succumbing to the scientific method. Last week, scientists revealed the virus’ structure, gleaned further insight into its ties to the birth defect microcephaly and found out just how little some people seem to know about Zika. Public health researchers at Harvard University released the results ... Read more

Hubble telescope snaps stunning pic for its 26th birthday

Time to add another gorgeous space photo to the Hubble Space Telescope’s list of greatest hits. For the orbiting observatory’s 26th anniversary in space, astronomers snapped a picture of the Bubble Nebula, a seven-light-year-wide pocket of gas being blown away by a blazing massive star about 7,100 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. The star ... Read more

Leptospirosis bacterium still haunts swimming holes

Danger in ‘swimming hole’  — As warm weather approaches, the old swimming hole will again beckon boys and girls in farm areas. But disease germs lurk in waters exposed to cattle and other animals…. One “swimming hole disease” called leptospirosis is caused by water-borne Leptospira pomona…. Warm summer temperatures are ideal for maintaining leptospiral organisms ... Read more

Despite misuses, statistics still has solid foundation

In many realms of science today, “statistical wisdom” seems to be in short supply. Misuse of statistics in scientific research has contributed substantially to the widespread “reproducibility crisis” afflicting many fields (SN: 4/2/16, p. 8; SN: 1/24/15, p. 20). Recently the American Statistical Association produced a list of principles warning against multiple misbeliefs about drawing ... Read more

Antibiotics in cattle leave their mark in dung

Overuse of antibiotics in livestock can spread drug-resistant microbes — via farm workers or even breezy weather. But there’s more than one reason stay upwind of drugged cattle. Dung beetles (Aphodius fossor) make their living on cattle dung pats, which are rich in nutritious microbes. To investigate the effects of cattle antibiotics on this smaller ... Read more

Tiny plastics cause big problems for perch, lab study finds

Editor’s note: On May 3, 2017, Science retracted the study described in this article. Based on findings from a review board at Uppsala University, Science cites three reasons for pulling the study: The experiments lacked ethical approval, the original data do not appear in the paper and questions emerged about experimental methods. Microscopic pieces of ... Read more

Limestone world gobbled by planet-eating white dwarf

SAN DIEGO — A remote planet — the first with hints of a limestone shell — has been shredded by its dead sun, a new study suggests. A generous heaping of carbon is raining down on a white dwarf, the exposed core of a dead star, astrophysicist Carl Melis of the University of California, San ... Read more

Courts’ use of statistics should be put on trial

The Rev. Thomas Bayes was, as the honorific the Rev. suggests, a clergyman. Too bad he wasn’t a lawyer. Maybe if he had been, lawyers today wouldn’t be so reluctant to enlist his mathematical insights in the pursuit of justice. In many sorts of court cases, from whether talcum powder causes ovarian cancer to The ... Read more