It sounds positively un-American to have government picking winner and losers in the drug marketplace, but the writing is on the wall for our health future: taxpayer-funded Medicare is going to be…

A new study in Nature Climate Change challenges the assumption in climate models that climate is the primary driver of how quickly organic matter decomposes in different regions.  A long-term…

A study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that metformin, the world's most widely used anti-diabetic drug, slows aging and increases lifespan.  In their experiments, the…

A recent analysis of voting trends of physicians has found that political contributions have gone up a lot and more of them have become Democrats; no surprise given Democratic efforts to increase…

Obesity often is associated with increased health related complications and death but some studies have found an 'obesity paradox' - people who are obese but otherwise healthy. Concern has been that…

A team of researchers has developed sperm-inspired microrobots which can be controlled by oscillating weak magnetic fields.  The 322 micron-long robots consist solely of a head coated in a thick…

To some, it might seem that you can patent anything these days. Last week a weird story appeared in my Facebook newsfeed: Amazon has somehow been able to patent photography against a white background…

Imagine this as a business model: You own a large potato farm. You have workers who grow and process the potatoes, you hire people to pay them, you have a sales force to sell them and then you pay…

In our solar system, there are two basic kinds of planets- smaller, rocky terrestrials like Earth and Mars and then large gas giants like Neptune and Jupiter. Though a middle ground between those…

Long-term follow-up results from a phase 1b immunotherapy trial combining drugs for advanced melanoma patients has shown encouraging results — long-lasting, with high survival rates — according to a…

Expectant mothers, a paper by social science scholars suggests that having an ultrasound to find out your child's gender may be giving subtle sociology clues about your views on proper gender roles…

Wine was once okay for pregnant women in moderation, then all alcohol was bad, then wine was good again because of the miracle product du jour,  resveratrol , but now it may be bad again. A new…

When it comes to sprint interval training, men have won the battle of the sexes, according to new research in The FASEB Journal. A new study found that men create more new proteins as a result of…

The germ Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most stomach ulcers, but a new review of the literature published in Alimentary Pharmacology&Therapeutics suggests that treating the bacteria is…

A 21-year study of over 2,300 rivers in Britain measured the presence of clean-river invertebrates - a yardstick for river health –   and found they are the cleanest they've been in over two…

New research in the journal Sleep and being presented Wednesday, June 4th in Minneapolis at SLEEP 2014 suggests that marijuana use is associated with impaired sleep quality. The results show that any…

Kim Stanley Robinson in his famous Trilogy Red, Green and Blue Mars describes a science fiction future with Mars changing colour to green and then to blue. But what also about snowball white after a…

Programmers may not be the guys with the best sense of humor around, but I found it quite entertaining to read a web page with a collection of source code comments arising a smile. The one I liked…

A new study in mice has shown that a previously developed male hormonal (testosterone) oral contraceptive method is unable to stop the production and / or the release of sperm.   Scientists…

A group of researchers have erased memories in rats, profoundly altering the animals' reaction to past events. Then they put them back. The study is the first to show the ability to selectively…