Black-eyed peas, a global dietary staple for centuries due to their environmental toughness and nutritional qualities, are small beans with dark midsections. In sub-Saharan Africa they remain the number one source of protein in the human diet. 

Now it's gotten its genome decoded, a problem almost as tough as the legume itself. 

A genome is the full collection of genetic codes that determine characteristics like color, height, and predisposition to diseases. All genomes contain highly repetitive sequences of DNA that University of California Riverside Professor of Computer Science Stefano Lonardi likens to "hundreds of thousands of identical jigsaw puzzle pieces."

Kratom, derived from the leaves of the southeast Asian tree Mitragyna speciosa, is a supplement that is not useless, it actually does something. It contains psychoactive compounds and users also like it as an analgesic, but because it is a plant users and kratom trade groups insist it should not have to go through clinical trials, even while they sell it as a product that is a drug.

Fish, insects, crustaceans, and even some plants possess the ability to change the sex of their offspring before they are born.

It's a genetic skill mammals lack. Or did.

A new study reveals a genetic system in mammals that enables two animals to mate and produce only females. A similar system based on identical principles would produce only males.

This proof of concept is in mice - an instance where a mouse study is actually valid - but the real benefit is for agriculture, where farmers may want dairy cows and egg-laying chickens and not have to deal with random chance. 

There is no question the government and its hand-picked advisors have hyped claims of opioid addiction beyond all sense. Doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and legitimate pain patients have all been steamrolled in an effort to stop what is really a recreational use problem. 

Data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys between 1993 to 2017 covering 27 states and Washington, D.C., before and after "medical" marijuana laws were adopted and 7 states from before and after recreational marijuana laws were adopted covering more than 1.4 million high school students finds that marijuana laws appear to be associated with a decrease in the odds of marijuana use in the past 30 days or frequent marijuana use after medical marijuana laws were passed.

When you ingest sugar from honey or sugar from cane, your body converts it to a common currency - adenosine triphosphate (ATP). The same goes for fat and protein.

It's the calories that matter and too many of any of those will result in body fat - and that is not all equal. The location of where fat is stored in the body can have significant implications for human health, according to a new study which compared fat cells from under the skin and from the harmful fat inside the abdomen, creating the first comprehensive genomic map that reveals unique features, which appear to 'hard-wire' different types of fat early in cell development.

The next time you need to get a creative boost, try playing a video game. Not all day, that is the road to unemployment, but taking a break to play an open-ended building game, like Minecraft, has been found to increase creativity. Especially if you just do whatever you'd like.

Population level metrics such as Body Mass Index (BMI) or statistical correlation using epidemiology don't do much to inform individual experience, and psychology faces the same issue. Surveys can tell us whatever surveys can tell us about what a particular group of people taking surveys think, but there is a reason that no polling group does well with Congressional districts that are contentious. It simply doesn't work. As we learned when we first believed the anti-vaccine problem was a fringe religious issue, what people claim on surveys is not their behavior.(1)

Automated automobiles are coming, the question is how they will behave. Not how they will perform, anything is guaranteed to be safer than millions of distracted individuals and ATM machines have shown what accuracy will look like, but how they will behave, their driving style, may impact individual uptake in the short term.

Do you want robotic efficiency, a car that won't stop at a cross-section when no other cars are around, or automation that emulates average human driving and not only stops but even peeks ahead to get a better "view" like a human might? The surprising result was that efficiency was not the overwhelming winner; people today prefer a blend of both. 

The underlying central metaphor of the new Marvel film "Spider-Man: Far From Home" is that news shouldn't be trusted. Many agree, but whether or not people label it "fake" seems to be based on how different their own bias is.

If you are a Republican and regard CNN is biased, having a conservative voice on their network does not make the outlet seem less biased, it makes the participant seem less credible, even if they believe the individual is honest.