Though it is the common metric, hospice use is not really an indicator of quality of end-of-life care. Instead, when researchers in the U.S. studied variations in patterns of hospice use between…

Recently we were treated to a repeat of a three part series, A Very British Renaissance by James Fox.  I found that the second episode had many overlaps with my area of interest.  North…

You are gazing over the clear stream, thinking of fishing the crystal waters in the Rockies. The next morning, you are stunned to see an orange-yellow sludge covering the stream as far as you can see…

New species evolve whenever a lineage splits off into several branches and so a common metaphor for evolution has been to describe evolution as a 'tree of life', where every branch constitutes a…

Both donors and recipients want more information about each others' health before participating in transplant surgeries, according to a study which challenges current practices and policies on…

For students, the start of the school year means new classes, new friends, homework and sports. It also brings the threat of head lice. The itch-inducing pests lead to missed school days and…

A decade ago, Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) cared little about science. They were run by a staffer from the Democratic party who was put in the place to mobilize soft-money donations from…

My wife and I went to see Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (“You and Me and the Bottle Makes Three”) Saturday at Conner Prairie, part of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra Symphony on the Prairie summer series…

Methane has 23X the short term warming impact of CO2 but, it was noted by environmentalists when they used to advocate for natural gas, methane is very short-lived and the amount released due to…

It used to be that clean energy was something that environmental lobbyists pretended to care about, at least when it came to raising money.  Greenpeace, NRDC, you name it, they all put clean…

A team of researchers has discovered a Jupiter-like planet within a young system that could provide a new understanding of how planets formed around our sun. The new planet, called 51 Eridani b, is…

Dosing obese teens with vitamin D shows no benefits for their heart health or diabetes risk, and could have the unintended consequences of increasing cholesterol and fat-storing triglycerides. These…

Twenty years have passed since the first observation of the top quark, the last of the collection of six that constitutes the matter of which atomic nuclei are made. And in these twenty years…

  So called "memristors" are an intriguing hot topic in electronics and nanotechnology, and highly controversial to boot. A certain type of memristor device was predicted to exist in 1971. Being…

Sepsis kills more Americans every year than AIDS, breast cancer and prostate cancer combined but it gets far less attention. Unlike those other diseases, hours can make the difference between life…

The results of a recent study show that children who report eating more polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), found in tree nuts, seeds and fatty fish, and consume a higher ratio of PUFA: saturated…

Refining oil starts with distillation Have you ever wondered why you can't just use raw crude oil in a diesel engine or why your car won't run by filling the tank with kerosene or engine oil? …

Male and female brains operate differently at a molecular level, according to a new study of a brain region involved in learning and memory and responses to stress and epilepsy. Many brain disorders…

As reporter Keith Kloor noted in his recent Nature story on the targeting of biotech professors and science advocates,U.S. Right to Know has issued yet a new Freedom of Information Act…

For more than a century, researchers have tried to pin down exactly why so many animal species play in their infancy. Now a new study in wild macaque monkeys has found that infants who play more…