We're bombarded with information at all times, so much that if we had to try and process it all times, we'd be paralyzed. Our cerebellum does information damage control by filtering out what changes. Evolution made it possible for us to conserve energy while still processing anomalies quickly.
Astronomers have discovered an adolescent protostar that is undergoing a rapid-fire succession of growth spurts. Evidence for this fitful youth is seen in a pair of intermittent jets streaming away from the star's poles.
Known as CARMA-7, the protostar is one of dozens of similar objects in the Serpens South star cluster, which is located approximately 1,400 light-years from Earth. This clutch of nascent stellar objects was first detected by and named for the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) telescope.
For centuries, cod were the backbone of New England's fisheries and a key species in the Gulf of Maine ecosystem. Cod is a cold-water species, and the Gulf of Maine is at the edge of its geographic range. As the ocean warms, the capacity of the Gulf of Maine to support cod will decline, leading to a smaller population and a smaller fishery, according to hypotheses.
Today, cod stocks are on the verge of collapse, hovering at 3-4 percent of sustainable levels. Even painful cuts to the fishery have failed to slow this rapid decline, surprising both fishers and fisheries managers. A new report in Science links the cod collapse directly to rapid warming of ocean waters.
Higher-spending physicians face fewer malpractice claims, and it is believed the reason is because they run a lot of tests to cover every possibility - all to keep lawyers at bay in case anything at all goes wrong for the patient.
Nearly three-quarters of physicians report practicing this "defensive medicine", which is broadly defined as the ordering of tests, procedures, physician consultations and other medical services solely to reduce risk of malpractice claims. Defensive medicine is estimated to cost the U.S. as much as $50 billion annually and that number is only going to go higher in an Obamacare world, where health care can now bring the full force of federal prosecution down on any mistake.
It's become common for vegetarians and environmental activists to criticize animals. Cows, for example, used to be criticized for carbon dioxide production, with manufactured claims like "it takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef" but that has long been debunked and CO2 is dropping thanks to natural gas, so anti-science groups have turned toward methane.
While it's true that methane has 23X the warming effect of CO2, it is so short-lived as to be silly from a physics point of view, but so are the anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements, and those still raise a lot of money for groups.
Achilles tendon disorders are both common and misdiagnosed, with about 25 percent of ruptures missed during initial examination.
A team of researchers has reported that analyzing circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) can track how a patient's cancer evolves and responds to treatment.
This type of blood test -- known as a liquid biopsy -- is less invasive, less costly and less risky than conventional tissue biopsies, which essentially are minor surgeries. Obtaining liquid biopsies could occur more frequently, too, thus providing physicians with up-to-date information about how a patient's cancer might be changing. This, in turn, could help in the selection of the best possible treatments to combat the cancer.
Environmental activists love to harass farmers because, let's face it, protesting farmers is safe. You never see activists protesting the far worse environmental damage done by Mexican cartels raising illegal marijuana. Dead bodies are terrible for fundraising.
But that doesn't mean the damage isn't obvious. A new study has found that the annual rate of poisoning deaths of relatively rare, forest-dwelling fishers (Pekania pennant) rose 233 percent compared to a study in 2012. The toxicants were associated with illegal marijuana farms on public and tribal lands in Northern and Southern California.
One day a few years ago, while working on wasps in a rainforest in Costa Rica, entomologist Kevin J. Loope, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Riverside, began reading about the enigmatic matricidal behavior of some social insects. In most social insects, such as bees, ants and wasps, the workers, which are all female, work their whole lives to help the queen produce new offspring. Yet, in the literature Loope found anecdotal reports of workers killing their queen, presenting a fascinating evolutionary puzzle.
Asthma has become the most common chronic disease in children, and that plus a corresponding increase in modern helicoptering parenting one of the reasons there are so many emergency department visits for asthma in the US.
A new study presented at the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) Annual Scientific Meeting has determined that the probability of future acute care visits increased from 30 percent with one historical acute care visit to 87 percent with more than five acute care visits, based on records for more than 10,000 children seen for asthma in a three-year period. It focused on acute care visits which included emergency departments, urgent care centers and inpatient admissions at hospitals.
The 2015 Antarctic ozone hole area was larger and formed later than in recent years, accorrding to a new paper. On Oct. 2, 2015, the ozone hole expanded to its peak of 10.9 million square miles, an area larger than the continent of North America.
Throughout October, the hole remained large and set many area daily records. Unusually cold temperature and weak dynamics in the Antarctic stratosphere this year resulted in this larger ozone hole.
In comparison, last year the ozone hole peaked at 24.1 million square kilometers (9.3 million square miles) on Sept. 11, 2014. Compared to the 1991-2014 period, the 2015 ozone hole average area was the fourth largest.
Just how bad was the bite of Tyrannosaurus rex? Pretty bad, because the feeding style and dietary preferences of dinosaurs was closely linked to how wide they could open their jaws and T. rex could open quite wide.
Using digital models and computer analyses, Dr. Stephan Lautenschlager from the University of Bristol studied the muscle strain during jaw opening of three different theropod dinosaurs with different dietary habits. Theropods (from the Greek for "beast-footed") were a diverse group of two-legged dinosaurs that included the largest carnivores ever to walk the Earth.
Substance abuse treatments that target drug and alcohol addiction are not frequently being used to also wean adolescents from tobacco, a study finds. There are even proposals to curb harm reduction and smoking cessation techniques at Food and Drug Administration (the American Council on Science and Health will be at the White House talking about smoking cessation regulations in a few weeks), which would keep young people addicted to cancer-causing smoke. The reason is likely because cigarette smoking doesn't carry the stigma that alcohol and other erious drugs do, according to the study's lead author, Jessica Muilenburg, an associate professor at University of Georgia's College of Public Health.
