Cranial surgery is tricky business today. Patients will need an aseptic environment, specialized surgical instruments and copious amounts of pain medication both during and afterward.

In ancient Peru, trepanation  - removing a section of the cranial vault using a hand drill or a scraping tool - was a lot more dangerous, and yet more common. They used it to treat a variety of ailments, from head injuries to heartsickness. 

Excavating burial caves in the south-central Andean province of Andahuaylas in Peru, U.C. Santa Barbara archaeologist Danielle Kurin and colleagues unearthed the remains of 32 individuals that date back to the Late Intermediate Period (ca. AD 1000-1250). Among them, 45 separate trepanation procedures were in evidence. 

The Earth is about 4.6 billion years old but no rocks exist that are older than about 3.8 billion years. However, zircons that were eroded from the sedimentary rock section in the Jack Hills of western Australia, which more than 3 billion years old, were eroded from rocks as old as about 4.3 billion years. These Jack Hills zircons are the oldest recorded geological material on the planet.

Caterpillars of two species of butterflies in Colorado and California aren't waiting for China and India to stop belching out so much CO2 - according to a paper in the journal Functional Ecology, they have already evolved to feed rapidly at higher and at a broader range of temperatures, just in the last 40 years, suggesting to the biologists that they did so in order to quickly to cope with a hotter, more variable climate. 

This represents the first instance where recent climate change has affected physiological traits, such as the internal workings of how the body regulates feeding behavior, said Professor Joel Kingsolver at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Sure, post-menopausal women and single men don't need maternity coverage but have to pay for it it anyway. But, the US government can now argue, half of all people are paying for coverage they don't need already.

There's just one problem, argues a new report; while currently only a relative handful of the population has been able to sign up for the mandatory program, when lots of people do sign up for healthcare via the new health insurance exchanges set up by the federal and state governments, the fact that more than 80% of consumers may be unable to make a real estimate of their needs means they will choose a higher cost plan than they need.

A paper in the International Journal of Obesity has found that even weight loss can be discriminatory;  African-American women may need to eat less or exercise more than European-American women to lose the same amount of weight.

Some studies have suggested that women of color don't lose as much weight as white women even in response to the same behavioral interventions of calorie restriction or increased physical activity. 

Protests at economics meetings that lament globalization are done by the Agricultural 1 Percent - people fortunate enough to be born in countries where food is plentiful and cheap and they can protest rather than try to eke out a subsistence living in a difficult climate.

Yet the reality of economics defies their beliefs that trade and industry in developing nations will ruin those countries. Instead, an analysis of food availability and food self-sufficiency since 1965 by Aalto University in Finland found that food availability in the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America, China, and Southeast Asia increased substantially even though food self-sufficiency has remained relatively low.