Most people know smoking is risky, by now it is something of an IQ test if you take up that habit. There is no amount of awareness that will stop all people from doing all things, young people like…

Physicists have found a radical new way confine electromagnetic energy without it leaking away, akin to throwing a pebble into a pond with no splash. It appears to contradict a fundamental tenet of…

People around the world are living longer, even in some of the poorest countries, but a complex mix of fatal and nonfatal ailments causes a tremendous amount of health loss, according to a new…

An independent spent fuel storage installation (ISFSI) is a place to safely store spent nuclear fuel while it is waiting for a geological repository to permanently dispose of the material.  The…

An editorial in the Wall Street Journal summarizes the European Union’s decades-long flight from science, common sense and consistency. These un- or even anti-science positions are driven by many…

"Carbonated drinks linked with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest of cardiac origin" Right away, this looks suspicious.  "Linked with" is a standard junk science term that translates roughly into:…

It's time to stop counting calories and start promoting the nutritional value of foods, according to an editorial in Open Heart.  Drs Aseem Malhotra and James DiNicolantonio, and Professor Simon…

In its first clinical trial, an antibody therapy produced at least partial remissions in a third of patients with multiple myeloma who had exhausted multiple prior treatments, investigators at Dana-…

Following one of the largest-scale scientific reproducibility investigations to date, a group of psychology researchers has reported results from an effort to replicate 100 recently published…

Male teens who experiment with cannabis before age 16, and have a high genetic risk for schizophrenia, show a different brain development trajectory than low risk peers who use cannabis. The…

"If I offered you a bruised banana, you probably wouldn't be interested," said Jonathan Deutsch, PhD, director of Drexel University's Center for Hospitality and Sport Management. "But what if I…

This is just for fun. At first sight this seems impossible - the smallest stars are heavier than the heaviest planets, and how can something heavier orbit something that is lighter? But what if you…

Thanks to decades of action against tobacco, smoking rates among children and young people are in decline: far fewer teenagers are now taking up smoking than in the past. In England, for example,…

A new study clearly establishes a partial genetic basis underlying racial differences in slow-wave sleep, suggesting that it may be possible to develop sleep-related therapies that target specific…

Images of the systematic destruction of archaeological sites and art pieces in Syria are no news any more, but I was especially saddened to see before/after aerial pictures of Palmyra's site today,…

[Note: many of the images were upgraded to include more information about addition and multiplication, 10/25/2015] What is a quaternion? Mathematicians might claim it was the independent inventions…

The War on Fast Food hasn't led to the health care bonanza overzealous regulators assured us would result - but that hasn’t stopped them from opening another front on Happy Meals. At the American…

In 1985 Michael Hovey, an organic chemist at duPont in Wilmington, Delaware cooked up in his lab a batch of 3-methylfentanyl—a narcotic that is more than 6,000-times stronger than morphine—…

Much attention is being given to what people ate in the distant past as a guide to what we should eat today. Advocates of the claimed paleo diet recommend that we should avoid carbohydrates and load…

A scientist named Kevin Folta at the University of Florida has been one of a broader group of public researchers who have come under hostile, Freedom Of Information Act scrutiny with…