Which large animals start out with tiny babies? What's the surprising benefit of a flu shot? Find out in ScienceSeeker's picks of the best posts for the week of October 15-21 2018 #SciSeekPicks #SciComm

This week's best science posts explain why small talk is surprisingly important, good news on fish stocks, and American footballer John Urschel becoming a mathematics professor. But there are many other topics touched on in ScienceSeeker editors' favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise for the past seven days. Here is the full round-up of the ScienceSeeker Editors’ Selections:

You'll be surprised how tiny kangaroos start out.
Image credit: Stories So Wild

• Deceptive Sizing: 3 Newborn Animals Who Are Ridiculously Smaller Than Their Parents by Nisha Prakash for Stories So Wild
• Barndoor skates, once a textbook example of overfishing, have recovered enough to allow fishing by David Shiffman at Southern Fried Science 
• Extreme Botany: The Precarious Science of Endangered Rare Plants by Janet Marinelli at Yale Environment 360
• New Zealand's Ecological Identity: Should We All Kill Exotic Species to Protect our Natural Heritage? by Yolanda van Heezik at The Nature of Cities  #sciseekpicks
• The Smell of Fear by Miss Behaviour at The Scorpion and The Frog
• John Urschel Goes Pro by Jordan Ellenberg at Hmm Daily
• If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does? by Hussain Ather at Heuristic
• Computer Simulation Sheds Light on Supermassive Black Hole Mergers at Sci-News.com
• First stars spell trouble for dark matter by Sabine Hossenfelder at Backreaction
• Why Do We Emotionally Need ” Small Talk”? by Suzanne Phillips at PsychCentral
• Get the flu shot for your heart by Glen Pyle at Life Apps
• High Blood Pressure of Pregnancy Tied to Dementia Later in Life by Nicholas Bakalar in The New York Times
• The Cancer Stem Cell Saga by Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline
• Neanderthals, Denisovans and Modern Humans by Steven Mithen at London Review of Books
• Giant study links DNA variants to same-sex behavior by Michael Price at Science
• Sorry Gwyneth Paltrow, a lot of products and therapies offered on GOOP are pseudoscience by Dr. Jen Gunter 
• Will there be beer shortages as the world warms? Well, maybe by Michael Le Page at New Scientist 
• Identifying Barriers to Hand Hygiene Audit and Feedback by by Daniel Livorsi MD and Heather Schacht Reisinger at Controversies in Hospital Infection Prevention 
• Senescent cells, ageing and calorie restriction in 2018 by Mike at Qul Mind 
• When Times Are Good, the Gender Gap Grows by Emily Willingham at Scientific American
• The Impact of Politics on Workplace Productivity by Krystal D'Costa at Scientific American
• No black scientist has ever won a Nobel – that’s bad for science, and bad for society by Winston Morgan at The Conversation
• Henrietta Lacks: A Cellular Legacy by Madeeha Hoque at Seeking Science
• Time For A Social Media Headline Writers Ethics Panel at Mike the Mad Biologist

Check back next week for more great picks!