To gain followers on Twitter, some supposed social media and SEO "experts" claim that a lot of volume and following a lot of people is the road to popularity.  Not really. The most…

It's not all bad news for older brains. Credit: Shutterstock By Angela Gutchess, Brandeis University For years, conventional wisdom held that growing older tends to be bad news for brains. Past…

Have you ever wondered if any spaceship could ever travel through the sun with future technology? What if it is as big as Mercury or larger? Nothing material will work that we know of.  The sun'…

If you see a bat zooming toward you this evening, cover your hair. But if you do get bit, you will probably not the flu. Halloween bats can be a little scary knowing they are not going to spread…

The popular description of virtual particles “borrowing” energy and popping in and out of existence all the time is very misleading. There are no such processes “really happening” in the way of a…

Fantasizing about sex with two women is common but fantasizing about being urinated on - called a golden shower - is not. That's just one of the findings from a research project on sexual deviation…

When Australian singer and TV personality Mark Holden appeared as a clown recently on Channel 7’s "Dancing with the Stars", his supposedly “bizarre” behavior sparked furious debate and complaints to…

Children and adults alike are digging out those spooky costumes ready for a celebration. We’ve reached that time of year again: Halloween. October 31 is dedicated to remembering the dead. We’ve all…

More than 20 million US adults have chronic kidney disease but a new study found that a Mediterranean-style diet may significantly reduce the risk of developing it.  Every one-point increase…

4 billion light-years away, inside a collection of nearly 500 galaxies called Pandora's Cluster, are the faint, ghostly glow of stars gravitationally ripped apart several billion years ago. The…

Biology can be inspirational.  The spiral ramps in multistory parking garages, the way they are stacked and connecting parallel levels, are replications of helical structures found in a…

Humans are primarily social creatures - Thoreau may have pretended he wanted to sit among nature by himself and write a book but he was in a house built by someone else, paid for by someone else,…

Tropical Cyclone Nilofar is closing in on the border between Pakistan and northwestern India and NASA's Terra satellite caught it while it passed overhead from space. Wind shear continued to affect…

Organic marketing may like to portray itself as small mom-and-pop farmers standing up to Big Agriculture and corporate food, but they have a business juggernaut that would be the envy of anyone in…

Proponents of the Affordable Care Act are getting exactly the cultural result they wanted. They are able to declare victory because of a decrease in health care costs but don't mention it is because…

A new psychology paper says people feel sad up to 240 times longer than they do ashamed, surprised, irritated or even bored. The reason may be because sadness often goes hand in hand with events of…

A surgeon performing a lithotomy on a patient, c. 1747. Wellcome Library, CC BY-SA By Pam Myers, University of West London You don’t have to be a horror fan to be well acquainted with some of the…

J. Marion Sims by Jim.Henderson, CC BY-SA By David T. Z. Mindich, St. Michael's College On an October day in 1894, a group of New York City’s leading doctors gathered to unveil a statue in honor of…

For MSNBC, climate change is an opportunity to stoke anger over conservative “denialists.” MSNBC 5/12/14 By Matthew Nisbet, Northeastern University Recent Pew Research Center studies offer valuable…

In 2012, the Obama administration made the National School Lunch Program, which has provided free or reduced-cost meals in more than 100,000 public and non-profit private schools and other child-care…