Smoking is generally regarded as bad for you. I can't find a single person who will argue today that smoking is neutral, much less good for you. Nonetheless, even though we have spent billions of dollars advertising the facts of smoking and imposed punitive taxes on smokers, almost 30% of adults still do it.

Score one for body language: It seems that body shape and the way people walk hold major cues to their attractiveness to others, according to collaborative research findings published by Texas A&M University professor Louis G.

The legislative push for "abstinence only" sex education has suggested that nonmarital sex negatively affects a teen's mental health but a new study says that the negative mental side effects of a teen's loss of virginity are confined to a small proportion of those who have sex -- specifically, young girls, but including both boys and girls who have sex earlier than their peers and whose relationships are uncommitted and ultimately fall apart.

In the tropics, even the birds know how to relax better than those in the north. Tropical birds expend less energy at rest than do birds living in more northern climates, according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A new study in the May issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management reports that scientists from the New York State Museum, Wildlife Conservation Society and other groups have teamed up with the New York State Department of Criminal Justice to developed a new technique that uses fingerprints to track the fisher--an elusive member of the weasel family, and the only carnivore species known to have unique fingerprints.

The University of Delaware is helping to build a huge "IceCube" at the South Pole, and it has nothing to do with cooling beverages.

"IceCube" is a gigantic scientific instrument--a telescope for detecting illusive particles called neutrinos that can travel millions of miles through space, passing right through planets.

Excessive levels of fecal bacteria were to blame for almost 60 percent of Nebraska streams deemed impaired by federal and state environmental laws in 2004. In order to develop effective pollution-control strategies, it is important for researchers to identify the source of the contamination.

By using multiple methods, or a “toolbox” approach, to determine the origin of fecal pollution in streams, researchers were able to identify the source of fecal bacteria with greater certainty than if testing with a single method.

Two new papers demonstrate that adolescent female sheep that become pregnant before they have achieved their full growth may not be able to supply enough nourishment for their fetuses to develop without physical deficits.

These studies may also have implications for managing pregnancies of adolescent human females, who, in increasing numbers worldwide, are bearing offspring before they have finished growing.

Clean manure may sound like an oxymoron, but Dr. Brent Auvermann is working with feedyard owners to help them get the most "spark" from it as a fuel source.

"We're doing something that has never been done before," said Arles "Bugs" Graham, Panda Energy International's general manager for the Hereford plant. Graham spoke at the meeting. "We're using your manure as an energy source," he said. "It's a very complex process."

Researchers at the University of Warwick have found that sexual orientation has a real effect on how we perform mental tasks such as navigating with a map in a car but that old age does not discriminate on grounds of sexual orientation and withers all men’s minds alike.

The University of Warwick researchers worked with the BBC to collect data from over 198,000 people aged 20–65 years (109,612 men and 88,509 women). As expected they found men outperformed women on tests such as mentally rotating objects (NB the researchers’ tests used abstract objects but the skills used are also those one would use in real life to navigate with a map).