A new study conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) found that it might be possible for solar and wind generation to be cost-competitive with conventional energy, without federal subsidies, by 2025 - if new renewable energy development is allowed in the most productive locations.

Girls are told they are supposed to experience math anxiety and so they claim to on surveys but they are not actually more anxious during math classes and exams, according to a new paper. 

Sociology surveys suggest that females are more anxious when it comes to mathematics than their male peers. But education researchers identified a critical limitation of previous papers examining math anxiety: They asked students to describe more generalized perceptions of mathematics anxiety, rather than assessing anxiety during actual math classes and exams.

An international team at the GSI research facility in Germany have confirmed the existence of a new element with atomic number 115, verifying earlier measurements performed by research groups in Russia.

Marijuana went from being a gateway drug or a dangerous hallucinogen (a la "Reefer Madness") to being a 'safe drug' more recently, which is just as inaccurate,  according to a new review.  

The researchers reviewed over 120 studies that looked at different aspects of the relationship between cannabis and the adolescent brain, including the biology of the brain, chemical reaction that occurs in the brain when the drug is used, the influence of genetics and environmental factors, in addition to studies into the "gateway drug" phenomenon. 

The nature of the teenage brain makes users of cannabis amongst this population particularly at risk of developing addictive behaviors and suffering other long-term negative effects, they note. 

It is generally accepted that Parkinson's disease is aggravated when a specific protein is transformed by an enzyme but a new study found instead that this transformation tends to protect against the progression of the disease. 

Parkinson's disease is characterized by the accumulation of a protein known as alpha-synuclein in the brain. If too much of it is produced or if it's not eliminated properly, it then aggregates into small clumps inside the neurons, eventually killing them. Several years ago scientists discovered that these aggregated proteins in the brain had undergone a transformation known as "phosphorylation" -- a process in which an enzyme adds an extra chemical element to a protein, thus modifying its properties. 

A new paper says that words can play a powerful role in what we perceive.What we see is a function not only of incoming visual information, but also how that information is interpreted in light of other visual experiences, and may even be influenced by language.

"Perceptual systems do the best they can with inherently ambiguous inputs by putting them in context of what we know, what we expect," says lead author and University of Wisconsin–Madison psychology professor Gary Lupyan. "Studies like this are helping us show that language is a powerful tool for shaping perceptual systems, acting as a top-down signal to perceptual processes. In the case of vision, what we consciously perceive seems to be deeply shaped by our knowledge and expectations."