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"The economic crisis in Ireland has shown that "too big to fail" can quickly turn into "too big to save" as the Irish government tried to shore up faltering private banks, with catastrophic results for the entire economy. In a recent Op-Ed article, Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, wrote that despite financial reform legislation, the biggest banks still control our economy and pose a serious threat. After the last round of bailouts, the five largest financial institutions are 20 percent larger now than they were in 2008. If large American banks run into trouble, would they ever be allowed to go bankrupt? If not, what can be done if they start to fail? As global financial institutions grow in size, how perilous is this condition for the U.S.? "

"Witness testimony has been the gold standard of the criminal justice system, revered in courtrooms and crime dramas as the evidence that clinches a case. Yet scientists have long cautioned that the brain is not a filing cabinet, storing memories in a way that they can be pulled out, consulted and returned intact. Memory is not so much a record of the past as a rough sketch that can be modified even by the simple act of telling the story. For scientists, memory has been on trial for decades, and courts and public opinion are only now catching up with the verdict. It has come as little surprise to researchers that about 75 percent of DNA-based exonerations have come in cases where witnesses got it wrong. This month, the Supreme Court heard its first oral arguments in more than three decades that question the validity of using witness testimony, in a case involving a New Hampshire man convicted of theft, accused by a woman who saw him from a distance in the dead of night. And in August the New Jersey Supreme Court set new rules to cope with failings in witness accounts, during an appeal by a man picked from a photo lineup, and convicted of manslaughter and weapons possession in a 2003 fatal shooting. Rather than the centerpiece of prosecution, witness testimony should be viewed more like trace evidence, scientists say, with the same fragility and vulnerability to contamination. Why is a witness's account so often unreliable? Partly because the brain does not have a knack for retaining many specifics and is highly susceptible to suggestion. "Memory is weak in eyewitness situations because it's overloaded," said Barbara Tversky, a psychology professor at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York. "An event happens so fast, and when the police question you, you probably weren't concentrating on the details they're asking about." "

"One of the best aspects of science has always been its readiness to admit when it got something wrong. Theories are constantly being refigured, and new research frequently renders old ideas outdated or incomplete. But this hasn't stopped some discoveries from being hailed as important, game-changing accomplishments a bit prematurely. Even in a field as rigorous and detail-oriented as science, theories get busted, mistakes are made, and hoaxes are perpetrated. The following are ten of the most groundbreaking of these scientific discoveries that turned out to be resting on some questionable data. It is worth noting that most of these concepts are not necessarily "wrong" in the traditional sense; rather, they have been replaced by other theories that are more complete and reliable."