Nursing is hard. Veterinary medicine is hard. Biological sciences, particularly at the graduate level, are hard.
All of these are heavily female dominated.

Women don't avoid hard fields simply because there is challenging material.

It's almost like the situation is more complex than "Tech is just too tough for delicate ladybrains".

The paper actually doesn't even make the claim that rats and mice are equivalently intelligent, just that they were able to train mice to do the same things that they could train rats to do.

Their data show: 1) it took twice as long for the mice to learn as it did for the rats, 2) mice benefited from an additional basic learning stage that the rats did fine without, and 3) mice were more variable in their learning speed, while rats were more consistent.

However, they were working with tasks that had been designed for rats, so maybe there are tasks that mice learn faster and more consistently. (The comparison you make with dogs versus cats is very apt here, the two species have different behavior and motivation profiles that vary the ease of training specific tasks.)

A more accurate headline would have been "Mice can learn the same behaviors as rats". The hope is that mice will be trainable to a level of complexity that is competitive with the levels useful in research on rats, since mouse modelling of genetic diseases is so much more advanced.

FTFA:

But since the government decided that the activist groups she had been a member of 30 years ago were "affiliated" with a terrorist group, they considered that a lie. Despite the fact that there is no evidence the groups she was a member of had any violent mission statements, actions, or tenets.

Unfortunately, there were terrorist groups whose members were also members of otherwise peaceful groups. If someone in your church/gaming guild/book club/political group/fantasy football league is also a member of a terrorist organization, your group is not necessarily also a terrorist organization.

I live in fear of still being a lab rat in someone else's lab 14 years after I've earned my PhD and contributed pioneering advances to my field.

Oh science, I love you, but there is some scary shit out there for those of us who don't get tenure. Or even a faculty position. Yikes.

That's reasonable. Geeks are often excited about new innovative technologies, especially when they are disruptive to existing systems. People, not just geeks, are also susceptible to appealing narratives, which Musk has managed to develop.

Companies who provide jobs are incentivized by tax breaks. It may or may not be a horrible, corrupt system, but is a very well-established one. This is not a Tesla issue, it's a capitalism/politics issue. As an aside, taking advantage of tax breaks is so expected that if a company doesn't find ways to use them, they could conceivably be liable for failing their fiduciary duty to shareholders. It's simply poor business practice to not seek tax incentives. As an aside, there was some chatter about loosening environmental strictures, but I believe those were rejected by Tesla as poor return on mission.

Employ a bunch of people with a company that states and municipalities want to bring in.

Because a young, narrowly focused, small company is pretty risky. The entire house of cards could fall apart if another company comes out with a battery that outcompetes anything they can make. That said, lots of auto-makers have "junk bond status": "Even though the traditional U.S. automakers have now been profitable for the last four years, GM and Fiat Chrysler both still have junk bond status on their debt from S&P. Ford was only upgraded to the lowest investment grade rating last August." ~From the CNN article on S&P's Tesla bond rating.

They are luxury vehicles. Those are very expensive. Why did the company choose to start with luxury vehicles? To gain capital when they still have low production capacity, to establish a luxury brand name, and to offset the cost of fairly new production methods and expensive components.

The third generation vehicle is predicted to have a starting price around 35K. It is likely that later models will follow the trend of lower prices, but a cheap 4-door sedan will be dependent on both the success of the model 3 and the success of gigafactory production as well as improvements in battery tech. Is there a plan? Probably. Is it something I'd expect in the near future? Nope. My bet would be a decade, if Tesla is still around making cars then.

Money. Corporations make it. Employees get it, and employed people are very happy to have it, which makes politicians happy to facilitate it. Then election campaigns get money from corporations and pols get votes from constituents. Also, the narrative of renewable energy, American products, and energy independence sells exceedingly well to people on all sides of the political spectrum.

I don't know. It could be that the 24 hour news cycle thrives on sensationalizing things like killer floor mats and batteries that catch fire when pierced at the right angle, and media have no interest in presenting informative, risk/benefit analyzed news. But maybe not. It's probably Musk's fault.

People like narratives. This has a lot of hallmarks of a really neat story and a pretty neat car. It is clearly not a story you dig. That's cool too. It'd be excellent if you didn't act like Tesla is an abnormally terrible company because you dislike the attention other people give to it.

We understand you love your Prius or Priuses in general. That's cool, they seem like solid cars. A lot of people who buy Model S Teslas are apparently coming from Toyota (about 15%, google for tesla conquest data). I would bet that the same people who love the efficiency of a Prius are attracted to the all-electric Tesla. Now, for many people, a Prius is still by far the better choice. However, there's plenty to be excited about regarding vehicles that reduce oil consumption. BMW and VW are also doing amazing things. Tesla is just one of many, but it's only one of a few in the all-electric market producing a product people seem to covet. So far, it's made very pretty vehicles that are apparently quite nice to drive (never been in one). And, as mentioned, people like a narrative. So Tesla gets a lot of press.

This could be a giant step forward in cancer diagnostics, but media reports are - of course - sensationalizing beyond evidence.

In the study, the types of tumors tested share some similarities that might mean findings true of them would not be true of "all cancers". Specifically, none of the lesions tested were tumors of mesenchymal origin. No sarcomas, no fibromas, no leukemias. That's a broad range to not examine, and it means that generalizing this as a test for "all cancers" is premature. Additionally, none of the tumors tested were types that tend to show up in places that lymphocytes have trouble getting to (like the brain, eye, and portions of the reproductive tract).

It is good that they tested against COPD (a chronic inflammatory condition), but it does not appear as if they could distinguish between less-aggressive tumors and inflammatory conditions (I can't tell for sure because of the paywall). It may be that this is a test that is a good indicator of chronic inflammation (seen in many cancers as well as other conditions) rather than a cancer-specific test.

Regardless of the limitations of the preliminary sample set, the findings are very exciting and a potentially amazing discovery in cancer medicine. Kudos to the hardworking scientists involved!

"Ecosystem engineer" is an ecology term, and it's meant to be descriptive not precisely literal. It doesn't necessarily indicate any intention. TFA did a poor job of conveying the fact that this is a field-specific usage, not a description of "engineering" by animals.

Some animals have disproportionately large effects on the integrity of their ecosystem - disproportionate to their biomass and physical presence, at least. These animals are called "keystone species". Apex predators are often keystone species due to their effects on prey behavior and their strong actions as selective pressure.

Some keystone species provide specific metabolites that are critical to their ecosystem. You could argue that the organisms that allow termites to digest cellulose are probably keystone species. Nitrogen-fixing organisms would be there as well. Those examples, though have very localized effects.

Some species are keystones for reasons other than simple predator-prey relationships. Animals who significantly physically change their environment are frequently referred to as "ecosystem engineers". Burrowing animals whose dens are required by other critters are one example (in the US, tortoises and ground squirrels are notorious for this). Beavers, as mentioned above, are as well. Underwater, the composition of the water itself is the environment, and changing that composition can have a huge effect on the ecosystems involved. Use of the term "ecosystem engineer" in this context is simply meant to convey how critical whales are to maintaining a healthy and diverse ocean ecosystem, despite previous assumptions that their relatively low biomass (because of their rarity) implied that they were not particularly integral.

They shouldn't be.

Induced stem cells are the huge area of research devoted to finding ways around using embryonic stem cells. Basically, it's everything but embryonic stem cells in stem cell research.

We will, eventually, have reliable, cheap mechanisms for inducing stem cell potential in non-embryonic-derived cells, but only by continuing research on how to make them.

This is a travesty.