BETHESDA, Md., Jan. 8, 2016 -- Thyroid disease affects about 12 percent of the U.S. population. While many people with thyroid disease don't even know they have it, an overactive or underactive thyroid can cause a slew of problems, including weight gain or loss, mood changes and infertility. In children, an underactive thyroid can be fatal, which is why they are tested for a deficiency at birth.

Science is advancing rapidly. We are eradicating diseases, venturing further into space and discovering a growing zoo of subatomic particles. But cosmology – which is trying to understand the evolution of the entire universe using theories that work well to describe other systems – is struggling to answer many of its most fundamental questions.

Despite not actually having a car in production, the firm Faraday Future has headline-writers gushing about its “Tesla-killing supercar” – an all-electric car that looks like the Batmobile.

There is no doubting that the FFZero1 concept car just unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week is eye-catching, but it’s one of a number of new and transformed car brands.

Extreme rain events fueled by the current strong El Nino have started to affect California. NASA estimated rainfall over a period of 7 days while NASA/NOAA's GOES Project created a satellite animation showing the storms affecting the region over the past three days.

An animation NOAA's GOES-West satellite imagery from Jan. 5 through Jan 7 shows the progression of storm systems in the Eastern Pacific Ocean that hit southern California and generated flooding and mudslides. The animation was created at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The mass of the Higgs boson reported at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, 125 GeV, looked lighter than the expected energy scale, about 1 TeV, say researchers at Aalto University in Finland, who now propose that there is more than one Higgs boson, and they are much heavier than the consensus.

New CERN experiments at 0.75 TeV suggested evidence of a second Higgs in that region and some scrambled to embrace it. Dr. Tommaso Dorigo of Science 2.0 dismissed it as a spurious 750 GeV signal observed by ATLAS and CMS in their mass spectra of photon pairs, no different than other spurious signals that ATLAS and CMS have seen in the past.

There are certain universal patterns in nature that hold true, regardless of objects' size, species, or surroundings. Take, for instance, the branching fractals seen in both tree limbs and blood vessels, or the surprisingly similar spirals in mollusks and cabbage.

Now scientists at MIT and Cambridge University have identified an unexpected shared pattern in the collective movement of bacteria and electrons: As billions of bacteria stream through a microfluidic lattice, they synchronize and swim in patterns similar to those of electrons orbiting around atomic nuclei in a magnetic material.

While there is general consensus that the ability to imagine a never-before-seen object or concept is a unique and distinctive human trait, there is little that we know about the neurological mechanism behind it. Neuroscientist Dr. Andrey Vyshedskiy proposes a straightforward experiment that could test whether the ability to imagine a novel object involves the synchronization of groups of neurons, known as neuronal ensembles. Since the process involves mentally combining familiar images, scenes or concepts, Dr. Vyshedskiy proposes calling this process 'mental synthesis.' His research idea is published in the open-access Research Idea and Outcomes (RIO) Journal.

A new study reveals that drug shortages affecting emergency care have skyrocketed in the United States in recent years. While the prevalence of such shortages fell from 2002 to 2007; the number of shortages sharply increased by 373% (from 26 to 123) from 2008 to 2014.

These medications are approved, but for various reasons manufacturers cannot meet demands or have stopped making the drugs.

"Many of those medications are for life-threatening conditions, and for some drugs no substitute is available," said Dr. Jess Pines, senior author of the Academic Emergency Medicine study. "This means that in some cases, emergency department physicians may not have the medications they need to help people who are in serious need of them."

Injury and degeneration of fibro-cartilaginous tissues, such as the knee meniscus and the intervertebral disc, have significant socioeconomic and quality-of-life costs. But the development of effective treatment strategies to address pathologies in these load-bearing tissues has been hindered by a lack of understanding of the relationships between their structure and their function.

Now, a team of researchers from the University of Delaware and the University of Pennsylvania has shed new light on this issue, laying the foundation for better treatment of injuries such as meniscus tears as well as new therapies for osteoarthritis and age-related degeneration.

Oxygen is crucial for the existence of animals on Earth. But, an increase in oxygen did not apparently lead to the rise of the first animals. New research shows that 1.4 billion years ago there was enough oxygen for animals - and yet over 800 million years went by before the first animals appeared on Earth.

Animals evolved by about 600 million years ago, which was late in Earth's history. The late evolution of animals, and the fact that oxygen is central for animal respiration, has led to the widely promoted idea that animal evolution corresponded with a late a rise in atmospheric oxygen concentrations.