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Grey literature in medicine has some valuable insight, according to a new paper. The authors say that clinical trial outcomes are more complete in unpublished reports than in publicly available information.
The results found that publicly available information contained less information about both the benefits and potential harms of an intervention than unpublished data. These findings highlight the importance of recent initiatives, such as the AllTrials initiative, that aim to make clinical trial outcome data publicly available, in order to provide complete and transparent information to help patients and clinicians reach decisions about clinical care.

Unusual impact craters formed on Mars feature a thin outer deposit that extends many times beyond the typical range of ejecta.
Nadine Barlow, professor of physics and astronomy at Northern Arizona University, calls these craters Low-Aspect-Ratio Layered Ejecta (LARLE) craters, since the ratio of the thickness to the length of the deposit (the aspect ratio) is so small. 
Barlow found the LARLE craters while poring over high-resolution images to update her highly popular catalog of Martian craters. These craters stood out since they displayed this extensive outer deposit beyond the normal ejecta blanket of the crater. "I had to ask, 'What is going on here?' " Barlow said.

Scientists should be good at judging the importance of the scientific work of others - it's a peer review culture - but a new paper instead says that scientists are unreliable judges of the importance of fellow researchers' published papers.
They're better at it than you. But still pretty bad at it, according to the authors.
Prof. Eyre-Walker and Dr. Nina Stoletzki analyzed three methods of assessing published studies, using two sets of peer-reviewed articles. The three assessment methods the researchers looked at were:

A study to see whether narrowing of the veins from the brain to the heart could be a cause of multiple sclerosis has found that the condition is just as prevalent in people without the disease.
The results call into question a controversial theory that MS is associated with a disorder proponents call chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI).

America and the UK are sarcastic nations. Maybe they care too much. Children learn early to recognize sarcasm, especially if they have greater empathy, according to a new study.
For children, sarcastic language can be difficult to understand, but they generally begin to recognize sarcasm between ages 6 and 8, especially familiar sarcastic praise such as "Thanks a lot!" and "Nice going!" Some children take much longer to begin to understand sarcasm and the authors of the paper investigated whether differences in the ability of children to empathize with others might help to explain why.

A new paper analyzed organizational change in state health-related departments from 1990 to 2009. The researchers discovered that in many cases states kept the same organizational structure in place during the 20-year period, even though consolidating public health departments with Medicaid departments did occur with some frequency.
27 states had housed the two functions together at one point in the 20-year period. And when they did so, the funding allocated to the public health department remained unchanged. The authors conclude that the results help allay concerns that when such mergers occur they automatically lead to cutbacks in jobs.

A transgenerational study with female rats suggests that exposure to social stress not only impairs a mother's ability to care for her children but can also negatively impact her daughter's ability to provide maternal care to future offspring. 
Researchers at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University conducted examined the behavioral and physiological changes in mothers exposed to chronic social stress early in life as a model for postpartum depression and anxiety. 

Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are primarily cultural but the search is also on for a biological disposition that would confirm it outside primarily middle-class white girls in developed nations. Eating disorders are found in families but no genetic basis for predisposition has been identified. 

You've seen advertisements for brain training games, apps, and websites that promise to give your mental abilities a boost - even "Baby Einstein" videos for infants make the claim that they will lead to higher intelligence.
A new paper finds that brain training programs might strengthen the ability to hold information but they won't bring any benefits to intelligence, like helping you reason and solve problems.
The cognitive boost claims are based on correlations between working memory capacity (WMC), our ability to keep information either in mind or quickly retrievable, particularly in the presence of distraction, and general fluid intelligence. General fluid intelligence is the ability to infer relationships, do complex reasoning, and solve novel problems.

Marijuana use continues to be on the upswing in the United States. A public relations campaign claiming health benefits while ignoring health risks have led to diminishing public disapproval and more lenient legislation.
People who disapprove of a particular drug are unlikely to use it, but what about the gateway affect? Does the use of one drug affects people's attitudes toward using other drugs? Do personality traits matter?
High school seniors who frown upon the use of drugs are most likely to be female, nonsmokers or hold strong religious beliefs, according to a paper by Joseph Palamar of New York University. Palamar that examines how teenagers' attitudes toward marijuana influenced their thoughts on the further use of other illicit drugs. 

The early days of Ashkenazi Jews – that is, Jews with more recent ancestry in central and Eastern Europe – are a hot debate topic. It is believed that their ancestors migrated into Europe from Judea in the first century A.D., after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, and that led to some intermarriage with Europeans later on.  
Others have argued that they have a mainly European ancestry, and arose by conversion to Judaism of indigenous Europeans, especially in Italy. While still others have even argued that they were largely assimilated in the North Caucasus during the time of the Khazar Empire, the Turkic people in the Western steppe whose rulers turned to Judaism around of the tenth century AD.

We're better off if chemicals we use in everyday life are created from renewable resources using biotechnology - currently many of those chemicals are instead derived from fossil resources.