Cancer has always been thought of as something that grows rapidly and uncontrollably, but this view may be wrong.
New evidence suggests that cancer alternatively uses the “accelerator” and the “brake” in order to survive.

ESA have just signed a letter of intent to co-operate with NASA on a Mars sample return mission (see Agencies aim to bring back rocks from Mars). I hope this does not mean a change of focus for ESA, from in situ searches, to a sample return. This expensive NASA program is more of a geological sample return and technology demo than an astrobiology mission. It's not likely to resolve any of the central questions in astrobiology. Yet there is so much involved in ensuring that Earth's environment is protected, both legally and technically, that  it is unlikely that they are ready to return an unsterilized sample to Earth before 2040.

Everyone agrees the health of bees is a concern but there is confusion about why different governments have reacted. Scientific experts note any acute problems are due to a combination of bee keeping practices, Varroa destructor mites (which vector roughly a dozen different diseases into beehives) and the widely prevalent gut fungus Nosema ceranae. Environmental activists, on the other side, insist bees are dying and it's due to neonicotinoid pesticides.

The reason we know so little about the polar regions is not lack of interest. The polar regions are of great interest, for instance the Martian dry ice geysers in Richardson crater, one of the most interesting dynamic processes on Mars and the polar regions also have astrobiological interest too. There are potential habitats there that might even have fresh liquid water within 7 cms of the surface, beneath clear ice - of all the unexpected things to find on Mars with its near vacuum atmosphere!

Playing chess games flawlessly is a super-human endeavour, which even machines are still having a hard time achieving. However, the occasional flawless game does arise in human practice, albeit rarely. Usually it is a grandmaster who pulls it off. The absence of sub-optimal moves can be ascertained by extensive computer analysis these days, so the quality of the moves is not in question. 

A small study published in Hypertension resurrects the notion that oral antioxidants, broadly dismissed as ineffective, could reap measurable health benefits if they are bioavailable. And it was in older people.

The study consisted of 20 healthy men and women age 60 to 79 from the Boulder area. Half took a placebo and half took 20 milligrams per day of a commercially available supplement called MitoQ, which is Coenzyme Q10 which uses chemistry to allow the antioxidant to penetrate the membrane of mitochondria, the energy factories of our cells. 

While criminals will get guns illegally, and people who use guns to commit suicide may not be deterred by anything, people who are already prone to violence would be deterred from homicide by gun law changes, according to a new article which argues that federal and state laws should include people who abuse their partners regardless of whether they are married to them or not. And findings of abuse should be grounds for not being allowed access to guns. 

Today at the American Physiological Society (APS) annual meeting at Experimental Biology 2018 in San Diego a group of scholars posited that low "mental energy" may affect walking patterns in older adults more than physical fatigue. 

These channels specialize in uploading evidence of 'Nibiru', a modern myth, a planet that supposedly is about to hit Earth or fly past, always in the near future. This will seem absurd to you if you have a decent scientific background, but these people do not. They missed out on astronomy or science at school and some are very young. Some teenagers as young as 13, the minimum age for Facebook are in a perpetual panic over these videos, and we hear from their parents of even younger children who got terrified by these videos, sometimes as young as 8 years old.