A new paper has found that drug paraphernalia triggers the reward areas of the brain differently in dependent and non-dependent marijuana users. The 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows…

The Magnetometer instrument that will fly on NOAA's GOES-R satellite when it is launched in early 2016 has completed the development and testing phase and is ready to be integrated with the…

The University of Manchester's National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness found that mental health patients are at their highest risk of suicide in the…

What creates the two gigantic donuts of radiation surrounding Earth called the Van Allen radiation belts? The Van Allen Probes launched in 2012 want to find out. The inner Van Allen radiation belt is…

Rainwater can penetrate below the Earth's fractured upper crust, according to a new study. It had been thought that surface water could not penetrate the ductile crust, where temperatures of more…

Donating a kidney is a selfless act and it is going to save a life. But even before the Affordable Care Act, it had pitfalls if you wanted to add or change health insurance. In the future, the only…

Dr. Zulfiqar Bhutta, Robert Harding Chair in global child health and policy and Co-Director of the Centre for Global Child Health at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto says in BMJ that criminal…

ESA’s spaceplane is getting ready to showcase reentry technologies. Instead of heading north into a polar orbit, as on previous flights, Vega will head eastwards to release the spaceplane into a…

Neuroscientists have created mutant worms that don't get intoxicated by alcohol, by inserting a modified human alcohol target into the worms. An alcohol target is any neuronal molecule that binds…

A recent article by Nury Vittachi, Scientists discover that atheists might not exist, and that’s not a joke, received rather a lot of comments.  Among these were a few about the place of women…

Education is in something a Catch-22. If they have standards, there will be dropouts among people who don't want to do the work to reach the minimum levels. If they don't have standards, they are…

A new assay is inexpensive, simple, and can tell whether or not one of the primary drugs being used to treat malaria is genuine – an enormous and deadly problem in the developing world. The World…

Teenage boys are often considered aloof and distant by parents and driven by desire by teenage girls, but they are not so simple, say scholars at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public…

I guess every profession has its own kind of personalized spam. Here is a couple of recent samples from my own: From a Fermilab address: "According to the TRAIN database training for course FN000508…

In America, radical environmental groups get something of a cultural free pass.  It's understandable, because America is a two-party country. Due to that, otherwise scientifically literate…

For nearly four decades, some have suspected that persistent organic pollutants -  a large group of man-made chemicals that, as their name indicates, persist in the environment - contributed to…

Over 5 million people in the U.S. have Alzheimer's disease. It is the most common form of dementia and is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. Desperate families latch onto just about…

If your baby is allergic to milk, your choices might get a little more narrow, if the European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition (ESPGHAN) and the North American…

George Dyson. Credit: edge.org If you read about Big Data for very long, a quote from science historian George Dyson is sure to come up: "Big data is what happened when the cost of keeping…

Birdsnap is an iPhone and web based app that uses many of the techniques of facial recognition software to identify 500 of the most common North American birds. The web based version of Birdsnap is…