News Articles

Professor Simon Capewell, professor at the University of Liverpoolthinks there should be health warning labels on sugary drinks. He seeks the political climate of California, which is effectively a one-party state so if a current bill to put warning labels on sugary drinks makes it out of committee, it will mean vending machines would have to carry warning labels. Capewell thinks that can happen in the UK as well.
He likens sugar to toxic chemicals and cigarettes – warning labels for those are "now agreed by almost everyone", he says, leaving out that studies showed those things cause direct harm while juice and soda in moderation do not. Capewell says UK public support for warnings is high, suggesting that labeling is feasible.

Despite claims by the United States Department of Agriculture and the Obama administration that gaining more control over school choices will lead to healthier kids, school-based schemes to encourage children to eat healthily and be active have little effect. England has had similar lack of effect.
Low levels of physical activity and of fruit and vegetable consumption in childhood are associated with adverse health outcomes. School based interventions have the potential to reach the vast majority of children, and evidence reviews have suggested some beneficial effect but the poor quality of many of the previous trials means their effectiveness have likely been exaggerated.

Birds come in astounding variety—from hummingbirds to emus—and behave in myriad ways: they soar the skies, swim the waters, and forage the forests. But this wasn't always the case, according to research by scientists at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum.
The researchers found a striking lack of diversity in the earliest known fossil bird fauna (a set of species that lived at about the same time and in the same habitat). "There were no swans, no swallows, no herons, nothing like that. They were pretty much all between a sparrow and a crow," said Jonathan Mitchell, PhD student in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology, and lead author of the new study, published May 28, 2014, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Spontaneous thoughts, intuitions, quick impressions, we all have random thoughts popping into our minds on a daily basis and sometimes they even pop out of our mouths.
What to make of unplanned, spur-of-the-moment thoughts? If you know bad psychologists, you know they can't attend a Christmas party without declaring the entire room as having Asperger's based on snap judgments, but how do we view ourselves? Do we view spontaneous thoughts as coincidental wanderings of a restless mind, or as revealing meaningful insight?

Though we share superficial physical similarities, the cognitive differences between humans and our closest living cousins, the chimpanzees, are obvious - we metaphorically throw feces at each other while they do it literally. We have been able to use our superior mental abilities to construct civilizations and manipulate our environment to our will, allowing us to take over our planet and walk on the moon while the chimps grub around in a few remaining African forests.

Can you predict how sensitive your sense of taste is by sticking your tongue out and counting the bumps?
A long-standing hypothesis says this is so. But a little crowdsourcing of science - what used to be called doing a study - disproved that idea that "supertasters" owe their special sensitivity to bitter tastes to an usually high density of taste buds on their tongue, according to a paper in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience.

Older people who undertake at least 25 minutes of moderate or vigorous exercise everyday need fewer prescriptions and are less likely to be admitted to hospital in an emergency, new research has revealed.
The findings, published in the journal PLOS ONE, reinforce the need for exercise programmes to help older people stay active. It could also reduce reliance on NHS services and potentially lead to cost savings.
In the first study of its kind looking at this age group, researchers from the University of Bristol looked at data from 213 people whose average age was 78.

A retrospective study used large population-based data to compare the risk of hospitalization for six common chemotherapy regimens.  The work gives in the Journal of Clinical Oncology gives oncologists a new understanding of the toxicity levels of specific chemotherapy regimens used for women with early stage breast cancer, according to the authors from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. 
 There have been several prior publications in the health services research field addressing chemotherapy toxicity using claims data, but they don't outline specific chemotherapy regimens. 

If you visit the best noodle houses in Asia, they will happily tell you their secret: The amino acid glutamate, boiled from dried seaweed or fermented soy, or gotten from a can, where it has been stabilized with salt and given the name monosodium glutamate (MSG). 
MSG is safe but some epidemiological and animal model studies have linked it to obesity and disorders associated with metabolic syndrome, including progressive liver disease. Other studies have disputed that.

The slopes of a giant Martian volcano nearly twice as tall as Mount Everest, called Arsia Mons, were once covered in glacial ice and they may have been home to one of the most recent habitable environments yet found on the Red Planet, according to new research.
Arsia Mons is the third tallest volcano on Mars and one of the largest mountains in the solar system. The new analysis of the landforms surrounding Arsia Mons shows that eruptions along the volcano's northwest flank happened at the same time that a glacier covered the region around 210 million years ago. The heat from those eruptions would have melted massive amounts of ice to form englacial lakes — bodies of water that form within glaciers like liquid bubbles in a half-frozen ice cube.

The United States contributes almost $10 billion a year from Medicare into funding the Graduate medical education (GME) system but it fails to provide the workforce needed for the 21st century and lacks the necessary transparency and accountability.
Instead, it is more like political cronyism. New York, for example, gets 20% of the total while 29 other states, including places with a severe shortage of physicians with far more seniors and poor patients, get less than 1 percent.

Boulder, Colo., USA – Impact craters reveal one of the most spectacular geologic process known to man. During the past 3.5 billion years, it is estimated that more than 80 bodies, larger than the dinosaur-killing asteroid that struck the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, have bombarded Earth. However, tectonic processes, weathering, and burial quickly obscure or destroy craters. For example, if Earth weren't so dynamic, its surface would be heavily cratered like the Moon or Mercury.