Sleep apnea is a condition where people experience partial or complete obstruction of their airways during sleep and stop breathing several times a night. It can can manifest as loud snoring, gasping, choking and daytime sleepiness and is believed to affect at least 7 percent of the population.

There is correlation between that and obesity, diabetes, cigarettes, and alcohol. There is no plausible biological mechanism for why those would cause sleep apnea, it is just correlation - epidemiologists look at rows of inputs and columns of effects - and that is the problem with a new paper claiming a link to cancer. 

Quantum magnetism exploration is getting a boost from atoms about 3 billion times colder than interstellar space.

Space is cold, of course, but is warmed by the afterglow from the Big Bang. A Kyoto team instead used lasers to cool its fermions, atoms of ytterbium, within about one-billionth of a degree of absolute zero, the unattainable temperature where all motion stops, far colder than interstellar space.

The teen years are a challenging time for people transitioning from adolescence to adulthood, especially if they have mental health issues.

The online posting, sending or sharing of hurtful content is like being trapped in a small town, except possibly the whole world sees it. So why would someone do it to themselves?

That's the puzzle of digital self-harm. Like older forms of self-harm (cutting, burning, hitting oneself), there is worry it will lead suicidal ideation and attempts, but since peers assume a third-party is the culprit, the dysphoric or abnormal reasons to post cruel, embarrassing or threatening content about themselves is compounded.

It is common today to have food, or even a feast, to memorialize the dead. It is a legacy from ancient times.

Across the Roman Empire, funerary rituals were conducted to ensure the protection of deities and the memory of the deceased.  They were required by law.

Whole Foods and other high-priced alternatives like Farmer's Markets sell imagery of pretty, thin people carrying bountiful produce, but the icky reality is that, unless it is canned or frozen, most food purchased rots quickly.

It is nature at work. Rot caused by microorganisms spoils half of all food harvested. The strange good news is that because plants also volatile organic compounds into the environment, science can detect those and tackle plant disease faster, which will prevent food loss. 

Once upon a time, terms like 'primate' and 'Neanderthal' were used as joke insults, but they are both entirely true, and the latter even more so now.

Unlike databases of where people live such as companies like Ancestry uses to claim 'you are 12 percent Irish', biology is not a marketing gimmick. Once the science is settled, social fields like anthropology and other exploratory studies can fill in some gaps.

A new exploratory paper assessed the facial structure of prehistoric skulls, hoping to support the hypothesis that a lot of Neanderthal-Modern interbreeding took place in the Near East – the region ranging from North Africa to Iraq.