Should we believe the USA Today headline, "Drinking four cups of coffee daily lowers risk of death"? And what should we make of, "Mouthwash May Trigger Diabetes. . ."? Should we really eat more, not less, fat? These sorts of conclusions, supposedly from "scientific studies," seem to vary from month to month, leading to ever-shifting "expert" recommendations. However, most of their admonitions are based on dubious "research" that lacks a valid scientific basis and should be relegated to the realm of folklore and anecdotes.

Flawed, misleading research is costly to society because much of it is the result of poorly spent government funding, and it often gives rise to unwise regulation. One remedy would be greater statistical literacy that would enable the public--and their elected leaders--to reject "junk" science.

Statistics is a mathematical tool used in many scientific disciplines to analyze data. It is intended to provide a result that will reveal something about the data that otherwise is not obvious, which we will refer to as a "finding" or a "claim." Before undertaking an analysis, a researcher formulates a hypothesis --which is his best guess for what he expects to happen.

A body has been found on an Iranian oil tanker, which earlier collided with a cargo ship off the eastern coast of China and caught fire, officials said. Dozens of crew members from the tanker remain missing after the collision.

The body was sent to Shanghai for identification, according to Mohammad Rastad, head of Iran's Ports and Maritime Organization, as cited by ISNA news agency on Monday. The deceased was reportedly a crew member aboard the tanker, Reuters said.

Fire and rescue operations are continuing in the area but efforts are being hampered by the heavy blaze, Rastad said. Rescuers were forced to retreat due to the presence of toxic clouds, while the tanker is "in danger of exploding or sinking," China's Transportation Ministry said.There was no sign of survivors nearly 36 hours after the oil tanker caught fire, AFP reported, citing Chinese authorities.

There is "little possibility" that condensate would leave traces in the ocean, a spokesman for South Korean company Hanwha Total, which rented the tanker, told AP on condition of anonymity.

The city council in Fort Collins, Colorado, last night voted to move ahead with a municipal fiber broadband network providing gigabit speeds, two months after the cable industry failed to stop the project.

Last night's city council vote came after residents of Fort Collins approved a ballot question that authorized the city to build a broadband network. The ballot question, passed in November, didn't guarantee that the network would be built because city council approval was still required, but that hurdle is now cleared. Residents approved the ballot question despite an anti-municipal broadband lobbying campaign backed by groups funded by Comcast and CenturyLink.

The Fort Collins City Council voted 7-0 to approve the broadband-related measures, a city government spokesperson confirmed to Ars today.

An unfortunate church dinner more than 100 years ago did more than just spread typhoid fever to scores of Californians. It led theorists on a quest to understand why many diseases - including typhoid, measles, polio, malaria, even cancer - take so much longer to develop in some affected people than in others.

It's been known for more than 60 years that the incubation periods of numerous diseases follow a certain pattern: relatively quick appearance of symptoms in most cases, but longer - sometimes much longer - periods for others. It's known as Sartwell's law, named for Philip E. Sartwell, the epidemiologist who identified it in the 1950s, but why it holds true has never been explained.

"For some reason, [biologists don't] see it as a mystery," said Steve Strogatz, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics. "They just see it as a fact. But we see it as, 'Why? Why does this keep coming up?'"

Through mathematical modeling and application of two classic problems in probability theory - the "coupon collector" and the "random walk" - Strogatz and doctoral student Bertrand Ottino-Löffler propose an explanation.

The general outlook of a dog towards the world can influence that dog's risk of becoming anxious, stressed or suffering from other welfare issues. Dogs who are hopeful and optimistic are less vulnerable to emotional distress that those who are more pessimistic. Individuals of many species with a negative mindset are more likely to attend to negative stimuli, remember negative events and consider ambiguous stimuli more negative than individuals in a more positive emotional state. A negative outlook can therefore predispose dogs to suffer emotionally in conditions that may pose no threat to individuals with a rosier outlook.

People can more effectively prevent trouble if they know which dogs are most in need of assistance, but many ways of assessing a dog's view of life are extremely time consuming. Such techniques require extensive training and testing of dogs in various cognitive tasks, making their use impractical in most environments, including in shelters and rescue situations.

A new study provides evidence of a faster, easier method of assessing dogs that may provide insight into the risk to individual dogs of struggling with emotional issues related to stress. By simply evaluating each dogs' paw preference (being right-pawed, left pawed or the canine equivalent of ambidextrous), researchers can determine which dogs are more likely to be vulnerable to welfare issues.

If you could have one science fiction idea come to fruition in the next five to 10 years, would male pregnancy be on the list? The 1994 film Junior starring Arnold Schwartezenegger certainly imagined the possibility. It might not be as appealing as warp drive, long-duration suspended animation, or uploading a human mind into an immortal android body, but based on current trends male pregnancy is likely to happen far sooner than any of those. So get ready; the terms "mother" and "father" may take on new usage in the years to come.

How can a man give birth?

In Junior, Schwartznegger's character is a scientist who made himself the subject of a medical experiment aimed at achieving pregnancy by way of hormone therapy. Since as a man he lacked a uterus, an embryo was implanted onto the wall of the peritoneal cavity, the area inside the abdomen that contains internal organs. Because of the hormone therapy, the embryo developed the way an embryo would in any unintentional extrauterine (outside the uterus) pregnancy in a female. Whenever that happens in a woman, the pregnancy must be terminated, because it is extremely dangerous. In the film, it was intentional and therefore allowed to continue until the fetus was delivered surgically. But it was dangerous nevertheless, and would be dangerous in real life were anyone to implant an embryo into a man or women's peritoneal cavity.

In real-life, however, that's not exactly how it could be done. Instead, the man would be given a uterus of his own. Or her own, since the first uterine transplants to enable "male" pregnancy will most likely be performed on transgender people. Currently, gender-change therapy (culminating in gender reassignment surgery) can provide a man with a body that looks and feels female, with lactating breasts, even a "neoclitorus" reconstructed from penile tissue and enabling orgasm.

Transgender women cannot yet have babies, but transplanting a functional womb is not impossible, explained Karine Chung M.D., who directs fertility preservation program at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. "It's doable, it just hasn't been done...My guess is five, 10 years away, maybe sooner."

An archaeologist from The Australian National University (ANU) is set to redefine what we know about elderly people in cultures throughout history, and dispel the myth that most people didn't live much past 40 prior to modern medicine.

Christine Cave, a PhD Scholar with the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology, has developed a new method for determining the age-of-death for skeletal remains based on how worn the teeth are.

Using her method, which she developed by analysing the wear on teeth and comparing with living populations of comparable cultures, she examined the skeletal remains of three Anglo-Saxon English cemeteries for people buried between the years 475 and 625.

Her research determined that it was not uncommon for people to live to old age.

"People sometimes think that in those days if you lived to 40 that was about as good as it got. But that's not true.

"For people living traditional lives without modern medicine or markets the most common age of death is about 70, and that is remarkably similar across all different cultures."

Ms Cave said the myth has been built up due to deficiencies in the way older people are categorised in archaeological studies.

It is well-known that galaxies rotate so fast that centrifugal forces should have long ago beaten the gravitational self-attraction of all the visible mass we see, and torn them apart, but galaxies sit there apparently not being torn apart. This anomaly was first seen in galaxy clusters by Fritz Zwicky in 1933, and in the Milky Way by Rubin and Ford in the 1970s. Most astrophysicists have assumed that what keeps galaxies together is the gravity from vast invisible clouds of so-called dark matter and they have been looking for dark matter for many decades without success.

However, there is now good evidence that dark matter does not exist at all. For example, changes in the rotation speed as you go out from the galactic center are always associated with changes in the amount of visible matter at that radius, and nothing else, indicating that the dynamics are not controlled by any invisible matter. There is also a philosophical objection: arbitrary models like dark matter are insidious because they can be fudged to be right for the wrong reasons, and dark matter has to be adjusted arbitrarily for each galaxy separately, so it is not predictive.

The Russian military is expected to receive the first batch of fifth generation Sukhoi Su-57 fighter jets "very soon," the corporation developing the plane said. The jet was known earlier as the PAK FA and T-50.

"The newest 5th generation aviation complex T-50/PAK FA, for which we have high hopes and plans, will be delivered to the Russian Air Force very soon," the Joint Aviation Corporation (OAK) said in a Facebook post.

Earlier on Saturday, a source in the aviation industry told Interfax that the delivery of the first planes of the maiden batch is expected to take place in 2018. A similar estimated time of delivery was given earlier by then-Russian Air Force commander Colonel General Viktor Bondarev.

The first nine machines are currently undergoing flight tests, according to the manufacturer. While the early jets were fitted with older "first-stage engines," the Su-57 recently received a new engine, developed specifically for the fifth-generation fighters. The fighter, fitted with the new Product 30 engine, successfully performed its maiden flight on December 5. While little is known about the specifications, the OAK said last year it was an entirely new engine designed from scratch.

The Su-57 jet fighter, designed to replace the iconic Sukhoi Su-27 in frontline tactical aviation, made its maiden flight in 2010. One plane has an estimated price tag of about $50 million.

Parents often receive books at pediatric checkups via programs like Reach Out and Read and hear from a variety of health professionals and educators that reading to their kids is critical for supporting development.

The pro-reading message is getting through to parents, who recognize that it's an important habit. A summary report by Child Trends, for instance, suggests 55 percent of three- to five-year-old children were read to every day in 2007. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 83 percent of three- to five-year-old children were read to three or more times per week by a family member in 2012.