University of Louisville neurologist Robert P. Friedland, M.D., questions the safety of eating farmed fish in the June issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.  A legitimate worry about the nation's food supply or a case of an anti-farmed fish agenda? 

Friedland and co-authors suggest, despite any evidence or anything outside their own speculation, that farmed fish byproducts rendered from cows, like bone meal, could transmit Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, commonly known as mad cow disease, to humans.   Despite the lack of evidence, they are urging government regulators to ban feeding cow meat or bone meal to fish until the safety of this common practice can be confirmed.   How can you further prove something is safe that has been in use for decades without issue?

An ancient Ice Age, once regarded as a brief 'blip', in fact lasted for 30 million years according to geologists at the University of Leicester who will discuss their findings during a public lecture at the University on Wednesday June 17. Their research suggests that during this ancient Ice Age, global warming was curbed through the burial of organic carbon that eventually lead to the formation of oil – including the 'hot shales' of north Africa and Arabia which constitute the world's most productive oil source rock. This ice age has been named 'the Early Palaeozoic Icehouse' by Dr Alex Page and his colleagues in a paper published as part of a collaborative Deep Time Climate project between the University of Leicester and British Geological Survey.

An enormous eruption has found its way to Earth after travelling for many thousands of years across space. Studying this blast with ESA's XMM-Newton and Integral space observatories, astronomers have discovered a dead star belonging to a rare group: the magnetars.

X-Rays from the giant outburst arrived on Earth on 22 August 2008, and triggered an automatic sensor on the NASA-led, international Swift satellite. Just twelve hours later, XMM-Newton zeroed in and began to collect the radiation, allowing the most detailed spectral study of the decay of a magnetar outburst.

In 1987, Robert Bork became the target of an organized, special interest smear campaign aimed at ruining his chances for being confirmed by the Senate as a Supreme Court justice.   Since then, a tit-for-tat approach has made Supreme Court appointments a political football.

These politicized Supreme Court nomination battles have eroded public support of the high Court and a study of public reactions during the Samuel Alito nomination process shows it is only going to get worse.

In a new book, researchers reveal how television advertisements that opposed Alito's nomination in 2005 had a disturbing side effect: Many people who viewed those highly political ads become less supportive of the Supreme Court as an institution.

A completely new species has been discovered in the Russian mountains!

Sorry, it's not Bigfoot or Yeti or Abominable Snowman or Bumble or whatever he is called where you are from, though "Bigfoot Found!" on the cover with a big "No" inside would certainly be a strategy worthy of some other science publications.   

Instead, it is a much more scientific discovery; a plant root.    Professor Hans Cornelissen and his Russian-Dutch team describe this finding in Ecology Letters.

The root belongs to the small alpine plant Corydalis conorhiza and unlike normal roots, which grow into soil, they extend upward through layers of snow. Given this novel behavior, the scientists have termed them 'snow roots'.

Researchers here have used sediment from the deep ocean bottom to reconstruct a record of ancient climate dating back more than 500,000 years.   The data were extracted from  the top 65 feet of a 1,312 foot sediment core drilled in 2005 in the North Atlantic Ocean by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program.

The results provide some new information about the four glacial cycles that occurred during that period.  While climate records from ice cores can show resolutions with individual annual layers, ocean sediment cores are greatly compressed with resolutions sometimes no finer than millennia.

Is Internet expression a fundamental right?   Certainly a subset of the modern generation has  demonstrated an irrational sense of entitlement about free content, to the detriment of media companies that have tried to provide it like the New York Times, but parts of copyrighted material have always been allowed under fair use.    What if court interpretation of fair use has changed?

University of Arkansas law professor Ned Snow says current judicial interpretation of fair use, a 150-year-old doctrine that allows people to use copied material in their speech, has become so constricted that it inhibits speech.