It was once commonly known than ancient Carthaginians sacrificed their children. The evidence was right there, in historical documents and graves. The city-state of ancient Carthage was a Phoenician…

A new paper has demonstrated the power of path tracking to measure social behavior and automatically determine dogs' personalities. How dogs behave during walks reveals a lot about traits such as…

Human induced-pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived from human umbilical cord-blood are capable of repairing damaged retinal vascular tissue in mice, according to a new paper. The adult stem…

What would you do if you were on a borehole drilling expedition and tapped into 1,000 degree Celcius magma at slightly over a mile deep? Most people would run but the Icelandic Deep Drilling Project…

Researchers have sequenced the genome of the world's oldest continuously surviving cancer, a transmissible genital cancer which causes grotesque genital tumors in dogs around the world. It first…

I must say I feel proud of myself tonight. In Italy a unified procedure to rank candidates to the position of associate or full professor has been launched last year, and I of course participated to…

A new paper says the the human sense of smell can detect dietary fat in food. As the most calorically dense nutrient, fat has been a desired energy source across much of human evolution - but those…

Though media stories about obesity are still prevalent, what gets left out is that American obesity rates have stabilized. It's unclear why. Some papers claim it was due to the lingering stagnant…

So far, the Affordable Care Act and its mandate for insurance coverage has been a disaster. It isn't just that the website doesn't work, it's that the bulk of the people signing up for the program…

The climate is a sensitive balancing act. There are a lot of knobs turning, making the future difficult to model. But trees have done a surprisingly good job adapting quickly to keep atmospheric…

Diversity police regulate success by making overachievers victims of their own success. They spread quickly, preventing too much dominance by undercutting whatever gets ahead and enforcing lots of…

Marijuana is enjoying a golden age of cultural advocacy, to such an extent that its medical benefits are exaggerated while the obvious impact on health is trivialized. The health implications are…

America has developed a surveillance problem, hiding behind a facade of security. Britain has been down this road before, the average citizen in London is photographed 300 times per day by government…

Some recent poll results show that right wing people in America have widened the gap of evolution acceptance. Generally, only a few points on this issue have separated the parties but if you know…

Children who grow up in dangerous neighborhoods exhibit more aggressive behavior, according to a new paper in Societies. Lots of U.S. studies have suggested a link between dangerous neighborhoods and…

The difference between 1 and 2 and 101 and 102 is the same, yet children perceive 1 and 2 as being much farther apart, because two is twice as much as one. It takes years of education to recognize…

In every sport, an athlete who has enjoyed long-term success has the opportunity for free agency, when they can join the highest bidder. Though every athlete has the same contract-year motivation,…

Excess abdominal fat is an indicator for heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer and a person's measure of such belly fat is reflected in the ratio of waist circumference to hip circumference. Some…

Obese children exposed to high levels of air pollutants were nearly three times as likely to have asthma, compared with non-obese children and lower levels of pollution exposure, according to a new…

"Adam", our most common male ancestor, walked the earth 209,000 years ago, 9,000 years earlier than previously believed and within the time frame of his other half "Eve", the genetic maternal…