After the U.S.started vaccinating kids for measles in the 1960s, children predictably stopped getting measles.

What happened next had not been predicted - childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from infections like pneumonia were cut in half. The same phenomenon happened again, in England, and then across Europe and it still happens today when developing countries introduce the measles vaccine.

Why children stopped dying at high rates from numerous and varied infections following introduction of the measles vaccine has been a mystery - but a team of researchers think they have solved it. (Subscription required)

Are all of the forces we know just parts of a single, unified force? How is the Higgs boson so light? What is dark matter? Is the world made up of the tiny, vibrating strings described by string theory?

Does every fundamental particle we know about have a hidden partner - a superparticle - that we have yet to meet? A popular hypothesis known as Supersymmetry predicts that they do but the first run of the LHC came and went without any of these partner particles turning up.

Fortunately for theoretical physicists  there are millions of possible models consistent with natural Supersymmetry and physicists will never build enough particle accelerators to eliminate them all. 

Oprah Winfrey, who made Dr. Oz famous by proclaiming him America's Doctor®, is dumping "The Daily Dose With Dr. Oz," a 'radio minute' produced by Oprah's Harpo Productions.

In a talk at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in Frisco, archaeologist Sonia Harmand of Stony Brook University in New York described the discovery of numerous tools at the site of Lomekwi 3, just west of Lake Turkana in Kenya, about 1000 kilometers from Olduvai Gorge. In 2011 they spotted what Harmand called unmistakable stone tools on the surface of the sandy landscape and immediately launched a small excavation.

The result: Stone flakes dated to 3.3 million years ago, 700,000 years older than the oldest-known tools to date and hundreds of thousands of years before our genus Homo even arrived.

“The artifacts were clearly knapped [created by intentional flaking] and not the result of accidental fracture of rocks,” Harmand told the meeting.

 India has once again had enough of Greenpeace. They suspended froze Greenpeace India’s bank accounts and essentially labeled them fifth columnists who put a political agenda of the best interests of Indian people.

If not for the rapes on buses if women are out after 9PM it sounds like they are interested in joining the developed world - science is a competitive advantage, something that Europe has forgotten in its conservative efforts to retreat into the past.

Geochemical tests on a burial box found in a tomb in 1980 have renewed questions about whether Jesus Christ was buried there. If he was buried there, in a family grave, there was no resurrection, 

The ossuaries have names like “Jesus son of Joseph”, “James son of Joseph brother of Jesus” and “Mary”, which is so conveniently consistent with the New Testament it could be a George Lucas film plot.

Tripp Keber, the CEO of Dixie Brands, Inc., among the biggest names in Colorado’s legal pot business, says there will soon be legal THC-infused luxury consumer packaged goods in 27 states.

And the big reason they will be so popular is because the culture war on smoking, funding by fines and taxes on cigarettes companies in the billions of dollars. has convinced the public that not inhaling cigarettes will prevent every kind of cancer - and therefore anything else goes.

An LD50 is a ratio of  in milligrams (mg) of pesticide per kilogram (kg) of body weight that kills 50 percent of test animals - mice, bees, frogs, whatever. So it literally is Lethal Dose of 50 percent of the critter.

Because it is a ratio, that means low is bad. 

Vitamin D is all the latest craze among supplement salespeople, for example, supposedly curing everything from autism to AIDS. It has an LD50 of 10 mg/kg. Table salt has an LD50 of 3,000 so if a James Bond or Mission Impossible villain ever gets you the option of choosing which chemical to drink, take the salt rather than the vitamin.

Evolution is messy, it happens in bursts some of the time and is painfully slow at others. On occasion, it is brilliant but sometimes, like in the human male reproductive layout, you have to wonder if it was drunk.

Dr. Carin Bondar shows both in a video about evolution, to the tune of "Wrecking Ball" by Miley Cyrus. It is at times hilarious, poignant and informative - just like biology itself. Kudos to Carin, Emily Hammel-Brisson (vocals) and Jordan Oram (everything else) for making natural selection fun.