The average premiums paid by employer-sponsored family health insurance plans rose  from $9,249 to $15,022 per year between 2003 and 2011 - a 62 percent increase, according to a new Commonwealth Fund report. The new report by the advocacy group tracks state trends in employer health insurance coverage and shows that health insurance costs rose faster than incomes in all states. 

Workers are also paying more out-of-pocket costs; as employer costs rose, employee payments for their share of health insurance premiums also rose, by 74 percent on average, and deductibles more than doubled, up 117 percent between 2003 and 2011, they say.

Vega is a summer star in the Northern Hemisphere, visible toward the west at sunset. Vega is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra and, at only 25 light years away, quite close, cosmically speaking. 

Due to its brightness, Vega has been used by astronomers as a touchstone to measure other stars' brightness for thousands of years - new findings say it may be more than 200 million years older than previously thought. The new estimation of Vega's age was made by more precisely measuring its spin speed with a tool called the Michigan Infrared Combiner, developed by John Monnier, associate professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan. 

The oncoming train wreck of climate change has an upside if you live in the Northeast part of America: fewer Snowmageddons brought on by cold weather.

A new high-resolution climate projection applied regional climate models to examine likely near-term changes in temperature and precipitation across the Northeast United States and says temperatures are going to be significantly warmer winter in the next 30 years, especially in winter. Winters will also be wetter. 

The climate scientists say they have created the highest resolution climate projections to-date for the Northeast from Pennsylvania to Maine for the period 2041 to 2070. The study used data from multiple climate model simulations run at greatly improved resolution. 

Some 3,300 years ago a tsunami must have hit the the island of Bonaire in the Caribbean, though no historical records of tsunamis exist.

Sediments don't lie and the sediments studied by scientists writing in Naturwissenschaften – The Science of Nature showed that this tsunami entirely changed the coastal ecosystem and sedimentation patterns in the area.

The Caribbean is no stranger to coastal hazards, including tropical cyclones, earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis, but historical records for the island of Bonaire only go back 500 years. It has not experienced a tsunami during that time but overwash deposits from a coastal lagoon provide evidence for a real doozy of a tsunami in prehistory.

University of Warwick economists say they can calculate the true value of  political lobbyists in American politics - quantifying the 'it is not what you know, but who you know' adage.

Researchers have announced discovery of a species of animal related to crabs, lobsters and shrimps that is new to science.