Writing about the weird soft-bodied fossils found in the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted that of 25 initial body plans exhibited by the fossils, all but…

Policy makers may think more sin taxes will cut consumption - but it doesn't really work that way. Supermarkets recognize there are a lot more poor people than rich people and so they don't mark up…

Pictured is Sydney Kandell with MSU and Sparrow Hospital residents Tiffany Burns and Lee Murphy just after surgery to remove the aggressive tumor that was causing her rare form of Cushing disease.…

Biologists have long wondered if mammals share the elegant system used by insects, bacteria and other invertebrates to defend against viral infection. Two back-to-back studies in the journal Science…

If you haven't yet read that mothers who lived near farms have more kids with autism, you will. The reason, it is said, is because farms use pesticides. You're not off the hook, organic farmers. The…

You probably knew this but a new report in Mayo Clinic Proceedings confirms that facial hair, sparks and home oxygen therapy can be dangerous. Researchers reviewed home oxygen therapy-related burn…

For obese people, food is a habit. They associate a movie with chips or cake and a movie is not a movie without the snack. Taken out of their routines, people quickly unlearn such habits. Nothing…

The United States of America hasn't been interested in building big new physics collaborations, such as the Large Hadron Collider, in the last 20 years, since the Clinton administration canceled the…

6,000 years ago, farmers were truly organic - and the diseases that can bring were even more prevalent then. But prehistoric people can be absolved of any guilt, they had no way to know that…

The Brus, written by John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, in about 1375, covers the Wars of Independence waged by Robert the Bruce, and includes a vivid, early description of the Battle of…

IAstronomers have discovered a bright, mysterious geologic object in  radar images of Ligeia Mare, the second-largest sea on Saturn's moon Titan. on Scientifically speaking, this is a…

The Higgs boson was detected using its decay into bosons but scientists from the CMS experiment at  the Large Hadron Collider have found evidence for the direct decay of the Higgs…

The Cornell arxiv is known to not accept preprints without a minimal screening of their contents. Still, I am sometimes led to wonder if a similar attention is paid to the liberty that authors at…

Lung cancer causes more deaths in the U.S. than the next three most common cancers - colon, breast, and pancreatic - combined, for a simple reason: poor detection. You can be living your…

A  research team has revealed conflicting climate change patterns between the middle latitude areas of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in relation to glacial and interglacial cycles which…

Anesthesia works, we know that. Properly done, patients can be temporarily rendered completely unresponsive during surgery and then wake up again, with their memories and skills intact. Improperly…

If the world will have 9 billion people or more by 2050, we'll probably be okay. The scare stories of food riots and mass famine once promoted by 1960s Doomsday Prophet Paul Ehrlich are today only…

In a marked cemetery northwest of Lake Baikal, a skeleton was found, buried ceremoniously with a nephrite disk and four arrowheads, one of which was broken and found in the eye socket. An arrow in…

New observations made using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show that dwarf galaxies are responsible for forming a large proportion of the universe's stars. The result supports a decade-long…

Cancer care has had lots of known side effects but one goes less discussed - the "financial toxicity", which is the expense, anxiety and loss of confidence confronting those who face large,…