News Articles

If you see commercials for brain-training products, the companies all tout laboratory studies and scientific backing for their products in how they can improve your brainpower.
Most intervention studies like these have a critical flaw, notes a new paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science: They do not account for the placebo effect.

Because the Obama administration's Climate Action Plan focuses on cutting carbon emissions by more fuel mileage regulations for American vehicles and are too narrowly focused on "tailpipe emissions", it is unlikely to help, according to a steel trade group.  Mandating more cuts in carbon emissions for America by implementing stricter fuel economy regulations is one of the three pillars of the Obama Administration's Climate Action Plan but Lawrence W. Kavanagh, president of the Steel Market Development Institute (SMDI), said "while this is a sound objective, the Administration's strategy to meet this objective is seriously flawed." 

Yoga improves the mood and mental wellbeing of prisoners, say psychologists who report that after a ten-week yoga course, the convicts reported improved mood, reduced stress and were better at a task related to behavior control than those who continued in their normal prison routine.

An unknown physiologic mechanism of evolutionary biology has been the ability of mammals to manipulate the sex ratios of their offspring as part of a highly adaptive evolutionary strategy. A new paper analyzing 90 years of breeding records from the San Diego Zoo says that mammalian species can "choose" the sex of their offspring in order to beat the odds and produce extra grandchildren.

According to a survey, fewer Americans overall feeling the blues, with rates of depression in people over 50 on the decline.

Sunshine is out. If you aren't slathering yourself in SPF 150 chemicals to keep it off of you, you're going to get skin cancer and no one will feel bad.
It's not that simple. As we grow older our bones become more fragile and a team of researchers have shown that this bone-aging process can be significantly accelerated through deficiency of vitamin D - which we naturally get from sunshine.
Vitamin D deficiency is a widespread medical condition that has been linked to the health and fracture risk of human bone on the basis of low calcium intake and reduced bone density. Working at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light ALS , the international team demonstrated that vitamin D deficiency also reduces bone quality.  

Every cell in an organism's body has the same copy of DNA, though different cells do different things so some function as brain cells, while others form muscle tissue. How can the same DNA make different things happen? Science is a step closer to answers and maybe even to putting in a piece of the autism puzzle.
Scientists know that much of what a gene does and produces is regulated after it is turned on. A gene first produces an RNA molecule, to which tiny RNA binding proteins (RBPs) bind and control its fate. For example, some of these proteins cut out parts of the RNA molecule so that it makes a particular protein, while other RBPs help destroy the RNA before it even produces a protein. 

Wind power may be hard on endangered eagles but greater prairie chicken populations are still okay, say ecologists.
The work, led by Kansas State University professor of biology Brett Sandercock concluded that wind turbines have little effect on greater prairie chickens - and that female survival rates increased after wind turbines were installed. Yes, wind power led to great life expectancy for females, a combination which should make this study worthy of the New York Times.

In the 2012 presidential election, seven out of 10 Latino immigrants voted for President Obama. News pundits declared the Latino vote as unattainable for the Republican Party.

Madagascar represents only one percent of the earth's area but is home to about three percent of all animal and plant species on the planet - it has long been known as a hotspot of biodiversity.
New research in Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests the island's heyday of species development may be all but over. 

The basics of how a muscle generates power are this: Filaments of myosin tugging on filaments of actin shorten, or contract, the muscle. Since the 1950s physiologists have had a formula – the length-tension curve – that accurately describes the force a muscle exerts at all points from fully outstretched, when every weight lifter knows there is little strength, to the middle points that display the greatest force, to the completely shortened muscle when, again, strength is minimized.
The assumption for 50 years has been that the power comes primarily from what's happening straight up and down the length of the muscle.

Sexual reproduction is costly.
For starters, only half of the population can bear offspring so the other half has to work hard to make sure they're included in the future gene pool.
Yet there is a payoff beyond the sex jokes sure to follow that statement. Sexual reproduction allows the mixing of parental genomes to generate potentially beneficial new combinations of gene variants that had not previously coexisted on the same strand of DNA, or to separate beneficial mutations from detrimental ones.