With any pesticide, over-use can have harmful effects on the environment.  DDT has not been used in America for over four decades but Rutgers scholars say that exposure to DDT may also…

There are efforts to label obesity as a mental illness and a physical addiction. While that's good for psychologists who want get eating therapy paid by insurance claims, it may undermine…

Two of the world's most devastating plagues, the Justinian Plague and the famous Black Death hundreds of years later, were each responsible for killing as many as half the people in Europe. A new…

When we open our eyes, visual information floods the brain and it interprets what we're seeing. Researchers recently non-invasively mapped this flow of information in the human brain by combining two…

If you care about what is in your food, you have no greater sympathetic intellect than me. But if you are an anti-science activist, you may not understand the distinction between what is in your food…

Backboned animals, at least the ones with jaws, have four fins or limbs, one pair in front and one pair behind. Thanks to that random prankster known as evolution, these have been modified into a…

Can a big name lead to a boost, even for low-profile work? Indeed it can, according to an analysis which found that scientific papers written by well-known scholars get more attention than they…

It's believed that humans discovered fire over a million years ago but when it became something controlled and used for daily needs is unknown. Fire is central to the rise of human culture and a…

In a way, you could be walking on water right now. Water is carried to the mantle by deep sea fault zones which penetrate the oceanic plate as it bends into the subduction zone. Subduction, where an…

Around 25.8 million Americans have diabetes and up to 79 million may be at risk for for it. A paper in the European Journal of General Practice  says that a simple blood test reveals an…

A new study has found that  a therapeutic music process that includes writing song lyrics and producing videos helps adolescents and young adults undergoing cancer treatment gain coping skills…

Children suffer from the consequences of maternal drug exposure during pregnancy and Cannabis is one of the most frequently used substances. A new study was done using mice and human brain tissue to…

NGC 5194, also known as M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, is one of the most spectacular examples of a spiral galaxy, with two spiral arms curling into one another in a billowing swirl, this galaxy hosts…

Chapter 10 of the report on the 2013 community summer study held at Snowmass, titled "Communication, Education, and Outreach" is available since Jan 24th in the Cornell ArXiv. It is a 26-pages…

In a forthcoming episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast, Julia and I discuss the philosophy and science of suicide, i.e. what empirical inquiry tells us about suicides (who commits them, how,…

Prion proteins are "misfolded"and cause a group of incurable neurodegenerative diseases, including spongiform encephalopathies (for example, mad cow diseases) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. …

A project to develop fast-blinking LED systems for underwater optical communications has led to discovering that an artificial metamaterial can increase the light intensity and "blink speed" of a…

In the late 19th century, classification of humans was in vogue and a lot of it was done based on languages and physical characteristics. Physical anthropology and ethno-linguistics created the Aryan…

The universe of cancer mutations just got a whole lot bigger. By analyzing the genomes of thousands of patients' tumors, a research team has discovered many new cancer genes, expanding the list of…

If you ever watched/read the advocacy cartoon/book/Darwinian morality play "FernGully: The Last Rainforest" you might think that ruining the rainforests is a modern phenomenon brought on by McDonald'…