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A team of scholars say genetic markers that may help in identifying individuals who could benefit from the alcoholism treatment drug acamprosate - patients carrying these genetic variants have longer periods of abstinence during the first three months of acamprosate treatment.

It's common sense that if you have ne mess and add another mess, you have created an even bigger mess.
But in arcane statistics, economics and social science, a bigger mess can lead to more order - a concept known as antifragility. 
In a paper published in The Journal of Chemical Physics, researchers found a counterintuitive interplay between two different types of disorder. One is thermodynamic disorder, or entropy. The other is the structural disorder—defects in an idealized system that can change its properties.

Tectonic plates, which make up the outer layer of the earth, are rigid. It is giant layers of rock, after all. But that is a bit of a simplification. They are not rigid and don't fit together as nicely as we imagine, according to a new paper in Geology by Corné Kreemer, an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and his colleague Richard Gordon of Rice University, which quantifies deformation of the Pacific plate and challenges the central approximation of the plate tectonic paradigm that plates are rigid. 

There are a number of government-funded campaigns to promote more participation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields, with the promise that a PhD means basic discovery and improving the human condition.
Yet what is left out of expensive marketing efforts is that there are now 6 PhDs for every job in academia - just because more people want to work at a university does not mean the government will increase funding to pay for it.  Instead of selling STEM careers to students, the National Science Foundation would be doing a greater service by showing students that academia is a lot like the corporate world - you will have to compete to get ahead, otherwise you will be trapped in a low-end job in a lab forever.

It's hard to have our steak and eat it too. Red meat was once implicated in a wave of studies and linked to heart disease and other maladies, before being absolved.
But the microbiome and the surge in advertising for probiotics to promote 'healthy' gut bacteria has implicated red meat again - this time by correlating a nutrient that the authors say is changed by gut bacteria into an atherosclerosis-causing metabolite, which means hardening of the arteries.

There is concern about pollution, overfishing and even climate change when it comes to reduced wild fish populations.
Farmed fish is the obvious solution but critics have a response for that also - they contend that hatchery-raised fish won't be as well adapted to their new environments or that the wild population will be "tainted" by breeding with domesticated counterparts.

In what they are terming the largest MRI study to date, a group of researchers writing in Cerebral Cortex have found that the brain anatomy in MRI scans of people with autism above age six is mostly indistinguishable from that of typically developing individuals and, therefore, of little clinical or scientific value.

It has slowly dawned on climate researchers that promoting the belief that curbing CO2 will prevent climate change has been a bad idea. American and European CO2 emissions have gone down, for example, but Asia's has risen, and we went beyond the 'point of no return' and not much has changed.
It was once the case that any mention of other climate-forcing gases got vitriol and hostile emails but now it is recognized that soot particles also contribute to global warming, along with methane. They just disappear quickly from the atmosphere. Short-lived climate pollutants (also known as Short Lived Climate Forcers - SLCF) also include sulfur dioxide, and to a much lesser extent fluorocarbons, but can have a measurable impact on the climate.

NASA's Dawn spacecraft visited the asteroid Vesta in 2011 and it showed that deep grooves circling the asteroid's equator were probably caused by a massive impact on Vesta's south pole.
A super high-speed cannon at NASA's Ames Research Center has shed new light on the violent chain of events deep in Vesta's interior that formed those surface grooves, some of which are wider than the Grand Canyon.
"Vesta got hammered," said Peter Schultz, professor of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown and the paper's senior author. "The whole interior was reverberating, and what we see on the surface is the manifestation of what happened in the interior."

Over 51 percent participants in the Liverpool Stop Smoking Service have tried electronic cigarettes and almost 46 percent are currently using them.

Two photons in free space do not interact. Light waves can pass through each other without having any influence on each other at all. For many applications in quantum technology, however, interaction between photons is crucial. It is an indispensable prerequisite for transmitting information through tap-proof quantum channels or for building optical logic gates. At the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), scientists have now succeeded in establishing a strong interaction between two single photons. This opens up completely new possibilities for quantum optics. The experimental results have now been published in the journal "Nature Photonics".

Interaction Usually Requires Bright Light

The microbes living in people's guts are much less diverse than those in humans' closest relatives, the African apes. What does that mean? No one knows, but the microbiome is all the latest rage in marketing, with probiotics advertised on television and a segment of the research community rushing to create studies to capitalize on that.