Social media is king. It can run pizza chain founders out of their companies, it can be used by anti-science activists to mobilize well-meaning science advocates against other science advocates, but what it can't do is change human nature. And human nature says people will visit those nearby.

Even when people have well-connected social networks state lines, they are still most frequently interacting with people who are geographically close. Except in Los Angeles. Apparently everyone is looking for a reason to leave Los Angeles. 

DNA methylation is a molecular process that helps enable our bodies to repair themselves, fight infection, and get rid of environmental toxins, but new research has shown one way it can go awry: Obesity. 

Scholars identified how DNA methylation is associated with a condition known as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which can lead to liver cirrhosis and death. 
Their evidence is that DNA methylation has a role in the initiation of NAFLD-related fibrosis, 

Between 1999-2016, young adults had substantially higher deaths from cirrhosis in 49 of 50 U.S. states. The deaths linked to the end stages of liver damage jumped by 65 percent with alcohol a major cause in adults age 25-34.

The data published in BMJ shows young adults experienced the highest average annual increase in cirrhosis deaths -- about 10.5 percent each year and driven entirely by alcohol-related liver disease, the authors say. Researchers studied the trends in liver deaths due to cirrhosis by examining death certificates compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research project.

Up-and-down ripples, swings that rise and recede like the teeth on a saw blade, are found in everything from stock prices on Wall Street to ocean waves; and they occur periodically in the temperature and density of the plasma that fuels fusion reactions in doughnut-shaped facilities called tokamaks. If the swings combine with other instabilities in the plasma they can halt the reactions. Why some plasmas are free of sawtooth gyrations has long puzzled physicists. 

If you want to know how to do time travel, ask a mathematician. If you want to show how math is not science, but is instead the language of science, hand those equations to a physicist. 

Gender bias against women is nothing new, especially when it comes to seeking venture capital financing for business start-ups,  but in modern crowdfunding -  where a "crowd" of amateur investors make small investments in new companies - culture it is just the opposite; female entrepreneurs are considered more trustworthy.

There are numerous ways to get a business off the ground. Friends and family financing, private equity, bank financing, venture capital, but the difficult road for entrepreneurs has meant that business leaders should be tough - and that has meant more masculine.

British smiles have an unflattering international image, but a new study has put tartar from infamously bad teeth to good use. By analyzing the teeth of Britons from the Iron Age to the modern day they have leveraged a way to use proteins in tooth tartar to reveal what our ancestors ate. 

Dental plaque accumulates on the surface of teeth during life and is mineralized by components of saliva to form tartar or "dental calculus", entombing proteins from the food we eat in the process. Proteins are hearty molecules and can survive in tartar for thousands of years. That's good for science. 

At the Applied Networking Research Workshop, a meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Internet Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, one group claimed critical communications infrastructure, buried fiber optic cable, could be submerged by rising seas in as soon as 15 years. 

They estimate that by the year 2033 more than 4,000 miles of buried fiber optic conduit will be underwater and more than 1,100 traffic hubs will be surrounded by water. The most susceptible U.S. cities are predictably New York, Miami and Seattle. 

Coffee is the official drink of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), so much so that a new study finds that it's downright Pavlovian. Even the smell of coffee boosts numerical performance. 

In their experiment, scholars administered a 10-question Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT - the analytical portion of a computer adaptive test required by many graduate schools) in a computer lab to about 100 undergraduate business students, divided into two groups. One group took the test in the presence of an ambient coffee-like scent, while a control group took the same test - but in an unscented room.

It's no secret that marijuana usage leads to hunger, it even has a colloquial name - "the munchies." But understanding the neuroscience of that that could also help people who lose their appetites during illness.