News Articles

Dengue is a serious illness diminished in importance in much of the developed world. Some efforts evolve around genetic modification while other efforts work on a vaccine.

Researchers say that magma columns in the Earth's interior can cause continental breakup – under the right circumstances.In some parts of the Earth, material rises upwards like a column from the boundary layer of the Earth's core and the lower mantle to just below the Earth's crust hundreds of kilometers above. Halted by the resistance of the hard crust and lithospheric mantle, the flow of material becomes wider, taking on a mushroom-like shape. Specialists call these magma columns mantle plumes or simply plumes.

Postmenopausal women who eat foods higher in potassium, like bananas, are less likely to have strokes and die than women who eat less potassium-rich foods, according to new research in Stroke.

Supplements are more likely than medications to lead to death or liver transplantation, according to a new paper in Hepatology.The new research shows that liver injury caused by herbals and dietary supplements increased from 7% to 20% in the study group over a ten-year period. Liver injury caused by non-bodybuilding supplements is most severe, occurring more often in middle-aged women and more frequently resulting in death or the need for transplantation than liver injury from bodybuilding supplements or conventional medications.

Unless you are part of the 1 percent with your stock portfolio climbing, you are probably not an American who factors your experience into which price you pay these days. 
A common belief is that the economy affects what one purchases and that is independent of income; all people feel nervous when the economy is doing poorly. Yet the authors find that the influence of the economy even impacts the degree to which consumers incorporate past service experiences into their future purchases - especially when the economy is doing better. Counter to popular wisdom that firms should double down on improving customer experience when economic times are challenging, the authors of a new paper find that firms should do so when times are good.  

A recently published World Health Organization (WHO)-commissioned review of evidence on e-cigarettes contains serious errors, misinterpretations and misrepresentations, which may lead to policy-makers and the public not understanding the potential public health benefits of e-cigarettes. 
The authors, writing today in the journal Addiction, analyze the WHO-commissioned Background Paper on E-cigarettes, which looks to have been influential in the recently published WHO report calling for greater regulation of e-cigarettes. 

One of the common misconceptions about climate, brought about by the blight of 'framing' that afflicted science media in the last decade, is that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, solar radiation and temperature follow each other – the more solar radiation and the more carbon dioxide, the hotter the temperature. 
Climate experts always knew better but let the analogies go in hopes that it would get policy action done regarding too much CO2, but too much simplification has done more harm than good, and now more people than ever assume science is just another extension of politics - in issues ranging from the climate to genetic modification to vaccines and even energy policy.

Exfoliation syndrome (XFS) is an eye condition that is a leading cause of secondary open-angle glaucoma and can lead to an increased risk of cataract and cataract surgery complications. 

California's water supply depends on a clean snow pack and healthy mountain lakes.  Because of geography, California cities are conducive to air pollution and a similar effect can be found in lakes. The lakes in the Sierra Nevada are the most sensitive lakes in the U.S. to acid rain, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The lakes receive a large amount of runoff in the spring from the melting snowpack. If the snowpack is polluted, the lakes will be polluted.

The most compelling argument for genetic modification is not accepting science or progressive ideals, it is that it has caused food production to dematerialize in dramatic fashion. Scientific optimization of plants, superior to all genetic modification schemes of the last 12,000 years, have allowed American farmers to raise more food on less land than was dreamed possible. 
There is a cultural tug of war happening in the developing world. Experts and policy makers want to embrace science but environmental groups promoting fear and doubt manage to scare the public. Yet there is a practical metric every farmer in India can see - ozone pollution in India damages enough food to feed 94 million people. 

Because detectable mass only makes up about 5 percent of the universe - and the universe is expanding faster now than in the past - a rethink of mass and gravity has been required. The umbrella term for this mass that must exist, but can't be detected, is "dark matter." Don't worry if that definition is vague, no one knows any more than that.
Dark matter can be inferred by gravitational effects - and things like antimatter and baryonic clouds can be excluded - and so hundreds of explanations have been created for it. A new one by Mikhail Medvedev, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas is called "flavor-mixed multicomponent dark matter." 

Should scientists handle retractions differently?
Peer review cannot catch everything. In many papers, there is no peer review at all, it is editorial review that checks off a few boxes and relies on post-publication peer review to find flaws. That makes retractions more common.