By Joel Shurkin, Inside Science - Once upon a time, there lived a people we call the Natufians. They were among the first to quit their nomadic ways and settle on land where they grew crops, lived…

Both daily and less frequent use of marijuana among college students has risen sharply, to the highest prevalence since the Monitoring The Future study began. In a silver lining aspect, cigarette…

The most recent Australian suicide statistics from 2013 show that, out of the whole population, men aged 85 years and over have the highest suicide rates. While the attention these figures have…

Scientists have pinpointed a population of neurons in the brain that influences whether one drink leads to two, which could ultimately lead to a cure for alcoholism and other addictions. A new study…

The first really exciting thing from Run 2 at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (at least for me) has finally appeared. A 2.9 TeV dielectron event was recorded by CMS on August 22. At this mass a new Z'…

There has been much public condemnation of the destruction of the Temple of Bel at Palmyra by Islamic State (IS), as well as the wider devastation being inflicted on the cultural heritage of Syria…

Again, this is just for fun. What would we look like to aliens, and would they be able to tell which humans look most attractive to us? So, to get us started, which of these faces do you find…

Back around 1960, at school I enjoyed a laboratory lecture on liquid nitrogen, watching a deep frozen squash ball being shattered at a temperature well below that at which it turns from a rubber into…

In the attempt to choose a mate, it's no surprise that females will select the more "attractive" of two males, but now a new study reveals that female túngara frogs are susceptible to the "decoy"…

Hospira has announced that Inflectra, (infliximab), the first monoclonal antibody (mAb) biosimilar therapy, has been registered in Australia. This registration paves the way for the Federal…

Young people who identify with the goth subculture might be at increased risk of depression and self-harm, according to new research published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal. The findings show that…

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…