News Articles

Sometimes you don't need to travel to the unexplored corners of the globe to discover a new species of plant. Sometimes they can be really close to home, you just have to spend 40 years of your life looking.
University of South Carolina
Professor John Nelson and alumnus Douglas Rayner have founds just such a new species close to home and they have dubbed it Stachys caroliniana, a new example of what is commonly called a hedge-nettle or woundwort.
And rarity is unusual among S. caroliniana's closest relatives. There are about 300 species in the genus Stachys, according to Nelson, the curator of the University of South Carolina's A.C. Moore Herbarium. He calls it a "cosmopolitan genus."

It's pretty common in culture, from Turkey to Tennessee, for a public that otherwise does not condone rape to joke about it when it comes to male criminals. And the more heinous the crime, not only does it become acceptable, but almost demanded in a justice system that often favors criminals over victims.
But raping women isn't acceptable in civilized countries. In the modern decade, 'gender' has become a subjective thing. Anthropology papers will even strangely let 'other', including alien life forms, be considered a valid gender in their surveys.

Scientists have identified four new genes associated with a severe food allergy called eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE), which has only recently been recognized as a distinct condition. Its hallmark is inflammation and painful swelling in the esophagus, along with high levels of immune cells called eosinophils. It can affect people of any age, but is more common among young men who have a history of other allergic diseases such as asthma and eczema. 

Archaea are a family of single-celled organisms that can thrive in environments like boiling hydrothermal pools and smoking deep sea vents deep underground, which are too extreme for most other species to survive.

It's a story as old as medicine. When it comes to treatments, people don't always obey the written word. When it comes to antibiotics, for example, people may stop taking them when they feel better so they can save them for another incident. 
Prescription medication guidelines are written specifically, to help people get the effect. So why do only 50 patient of patients take prescription medication as they should, 160 years after medicine became a proper field?

Doubling and even nearly tripling saturated fat in diets does not drive up total levels of saturated fat in the blood, according to a controlled diet study.
The researchers found that total saturated fat in the blood did not increase - and went down in most people - despite being increased in the diet when carbohydrates were reduced. Palmitoleic acid, a fatty acid associated with unhealthy metabolism of carbohydrates that can promote disease, went down with low-carb intake and gradually increased as carbs were re-introduced to the study diet.

Retired baseball stars Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro each have Hall of Fame-worthy numbers, more than 500 home runs.

Want to improve tomato crop yields without using more fertilizer? Try  verimcompost leachate. That is a soil ameliorant, which is basically a fertilizer but made of an organic liquid produced by earthworm poop. If you are really organic, you can even make tea from it. 
A research project recently studied the effects of vermicompost leachate on tomato seedlings subjected to various temperatures and levels of water stress. 

New findings about carbon deep beneath the Earth's surface suggest it might have influenced the history of life on the planet - and diamonds.
There is little understanding of how carbon behaved deep below the Earth's surface so researchers have created a model to try and calculate how much carbon and what types exist in fluids at 100 miles below the Earth's surface at temperatures up to 2,100 degrees F. 

25 years ago, the United Nations laid the foundation for children's rights and protections - at least as part of international theater. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most ratified human rights treaty in history but three members, Somalia, South Sudan and the United States, have not signed it even though the Reagan administration wrote most of the verbiage.

An ancient, deep canyon buried along the Yarlung Tsangpo River in south Tibet, north of the eastern end of the Himalayas, has been discovered by geologists who say this ancient canyon--thousands of feet deep in places--effectively rules out a popular model used to explain how the massive and picturesque gorges of the Himalayas became so steep, so fast. 

Vaccines are medical technology and like all technology some of the production runs are misfires. Some shots fail due to "leakiness," lack of effectiveness on certain individuals in a population, or shorter duration of potency.