News Articles

If you see a bat zooming toward you this evening, cover your hair. But if you do get bit, you will probably not the flu.Halloween bats can be a little scary knowing they are not going to spread most viruses. A research project finds that influenza viruses carried by bats pose a low risk to humans.

Fantasizing about sex with two women is common but fantasizing about being urinated on - called a golden shower - is not.
That's just one of the findings from a research project on sexual deviation undertaken by scholars at Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal and Institut Philippe-Pinel de Montréal.
Deviant sexual fantasies are addressed in numerous speculations and conjectures by psychologists but atypical fantasies (paraphilias) are so subjective they aren't really defined. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) refers to "anomalous" fantasies, while the World Health Organization talks about "unusual" fantasies in defining paraphilias.

More than 20 million US adults have chronic kidney disease but a new study found that a Mediterranean-style diet may significantly reduce the risk of developing it.

 Every one-point increase in a Mediterranean diet score was associated with a 17% decreased likelihood of developing chronic kidney disease and dietary patterns that closely resembled the Mediterranean diet were linked with a 50% reduced risk of developing chronic kidney disease and a 42% reduced risk of experiencing rapid kidney function decline.  

4 billion light-years away, inside a collection of nearly 500 galaxies called Pandora's Cluster, are the faint, ghostly glow of stars gravitationally ripped apart several billion years ago.
The scattered stars are no longer bound to any one galaxy and drift freely between galaxies in the cluster. By observing the light from the orphaned stars, Hubble astronomers have assembled forensic evidence that suggests as many as six galaxies were torn to pieces inside the 
Abell 2744
cluster over a stretch of 6 billion years.

Biology can be inspirational.  The spiral ramps in multistory parking garages, the way they are stacked and connecting parallel levels, are replications of helical structures found in a ubiquitous membrane structure in the cells of the body - Terasaki ramps in an organelle called the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), a network of membranes found throughout the cell and connected to and surrounding the cell nucleus.
A team of researchers have described endoplasmic reticulum geometry using the language of theoretical physics in Physical Review Letters.

Humans are primarily social creatures - Thoreau may have pretended he wanted to sit among nature by himself and write a book but he was in a house built by someone else, paid for by someone else, with clothes made by someone else, and writing a book that would be published by someone else.
People band together in groups to be stronger - about causes or for actual defense. How to prompt people to become social rather than anti-social is one of the central goals of game theory. 

Tropical Cyclone Nilofar is closing in on the border between Pakistan and northwestern India and NASA's Terra satellite caught it while it passed overhead from space.
Wind shear continued to affect the storm and from their image it looks more like a comet than a tropical cyclone.

Organic marketing may like to portray itself as small mom-and-pop farmers standing up to Big Agriculture and corporate food, but they have a business juggernaut that would be the envy of anyone in any business. And it's going to get better.

A new psychology paper says people feel sad up to 240 times longer than they do ashamed, surprised, irritated or even bored.
The reason may be because sadness often goes hand in hand with events of greater impact such as death or accidents and so we need more time to mull over and cope with what happened to fully comprehend it, say Philippe Verduyn and Saskia Lavrijsen of the University of Leuven in Belgium, who asked 233 high school students to recollect recent emotional episodes and report their duration. The participants also had to answer questions about the strategies they use to appraise and deal with these emotions.

In 2012, the Obama administration made the National School Lunch Program, which has provided free or reduced-cost meals in more than 100,000 public and non-profit private schools and other child-care institutions nationwide since 1946, into a political football and used beliefs that lacked any scientific basis to mandate what should be served.
Schools and communities went into open revolt. For the children we care most about, those school lunches might be the best meal they got, and those were being replaced by an agenda-based menu that no one wanted to eat.

Measles is one of the most contagious of vaccine-preventable diseases, with the average person with measles capable of infecting 12-18 people if susceptible, and the contagiousness of measles infection highlights gaps in vaccination in the United States that have appeared over the last decade, because of skepticism about childhood vaccination in coastal states like California and Oregon and Washington. In those states, otherwise educated people worry that vaccines may cause autism and would prefer that other children provide herd immunity for theirs.

A recent study compared two of the most commonly performed bariatric surgery procedures.
There are tradeoffs between the two surgical approaches in potential risks and benefits and so there has been an ongoing debate about which can achieve weight loss, with conflicting results in systematic reviews. 
The two procedures were laparoscopic Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) and adjustable gastric banding (AGB). The result was that RYGB resulted in much greater weight loss than AGB but had a higher risk of short-term complications and long-term subsequent hospitalizations.