If pharmaceutical companies are unethical, scientists are just tinkerers and doctors are educated by marketing, why would parents sign up their kids for medical research?

Those concepts are perpetuated in both mass and science media so it's no surprise that only 5 percent of parents have ever participated in any kind of medical research, and a large number of those are already ill. The downside that that is that healthcare for kids can't be improved. Animal models can only do so much when everything you eat at Thanksgiving contains a rodent carcinogen.

When a star goes supernova, it shines brightly for a few weeks or months before fading away. Yet the material blasted outward from the explosion glows hundreds or thousands of years later, leaving a picturesque supernova remnant. But how?

Tycho's supernova was witnessed by astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1572. The appearance of this "new star" stunned those who thought the heavens were constant and unchanging. At its brightest, the supernova rivaled Venus before fading from sight a year later. Modern astronomers know that the event Tycho and others observed was a Type Ia supernova, caused by the explosion of a white dwarf star. The explosion spewed elements like silicon and iron into space at speeds of more than 11 million miles per hour (5,000 km/s).

Methane has 30 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide but lacks the press awareness of its greenhouse gas cousin. 

And a new study in
Nature Geoscience has found that the seafloor off the coast of Northern Siberia is releasing more than twice the amount of methane as previously estimated - the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is venting at least 17  million tons
(teragrams) of methane into the atmosphere each year. 

Can you artificially strengthen a marital bond? 

Scientists at the Bonn University Medical Center found that if oxytocin is administered to men and if they are shown pictures of their partner, the bonding hormone stimulates the reward center in the brain, increass the attractiveness of the partner, and strengthens monogamy. 

Using chest pain characteristics (CPCs) specific to women in the early diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction (AMI, heart attack) in the emergency department does not seem to be supported by the findings of a new study.

While about 90 percent of patients with AMI present with chest pain or discomfort, some patients present without typical chest pain. Sex-specific differences in symptom presentation among women have received increasing attention. But it remains unclear whether identifying sex-specific CPCs is possible to help physicians differentiate women with AMI from women with other causes of chest pain, the authors write in the study background.

Retroviruses are important pathogens capable of crossing species barriers to infect new hosts, but knowledge of their evolutionary history is limited. By mapping endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), retroviruses whose genes have become part of the host organism's genome, researchers at Uppsala University, Sweden, can now provide unique insights into the evolutionary relationships of retroviruses and their host species.