In the many well-funded marketing claims of homeopaths and 'alternative' medicine claims, including a US government program that spends $120 million a year legitimizing treatments that don't work, what can easily get lost is data about what natural treatments do work.

The human brain is tricky but animal models at least provide some initial guidance. A new study presented  at Neuroscience 2013 found that enhanced extracts of spearmint and rosemary improved learning and memory.  The novel antioxidant-based ingredient was made from spearmint extract and two different doses of a similar antioxidant made from rosemary extract on mice that have age-related cognitive decline. 

An automated system,  the Child Health Improvement through Computer Automation system (CHICA), helps pediatricians focus on the specific health needs of each patient in the short time allotted for preventive care and improves autism screening rates by identifying at-risk children at the 24-month visit., according to a new paper.

Nationwide children typically are not diagnosed with autism until age 4½ or 5 years. 
Approximately 1 in 88 children has been identified with an autism spectrum disorder, according to estimates from the CDC's Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network. Once an autism diagnosis is made, it is easier for a family to obtain needed services, including early intervention to gain developmental skills.

Can you have a real climate treaty when the world's largest polluter says it is a developing nation and can't be bound by emissions obligations? 

Add in India and Mexico as exemptions and there is a reason why CO2 emissions have continued to climb while the US and western nations have jeopardized their economies to reduce them; the emissions have come with either a high replacement cost or the manufacturing has just been outsourced to countries that have no obligation to reduce CO2.

Optimization is dwindling and estimates can only accomplish so much so the so-called Durban Platform scenarios seek to reach a global climate agreement by 2015 that would come into effect in 2020.

Wolves likely were likely domesticated by European hunter–gatherers over 18,000 years ago and gradually evolved into dogs, according to a genetic analysis. There is debate over when dogs were domesticated and whether it was linked with the development of agriculture or it occurred much earlier. The new work claims that dogs were domesticated between 18,000 and 32,000 years ago.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a massive storm big enough to engulf the Earth two times over, is one of the solar system's most enigmatic landmarks and a mystery of fluid dynamics  – because it  should have disappeared centuries ago. 

Some new work will be presented by Pedram Hassanzadeh, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and Philip Marcus, a professor of fluid dynamics at Berkeley at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics in Pittsburgh on November 25th. They think they can explain why Jupiter's Great Red Spot persists

"Based on current theories, the Great Red Spot should have disappeared after several decades. Instead, it has been there for hundreds of years," said Hassanzadeh. 

When the Supreme Court was debating the legal foundation of the Affordable Care Act in the United States, Justice Antonin Scalia challenged the Obama administration claim that the controversial individual mandate provision was Constitutionally legitimate, even under the broad 'Commerce' clause.

"Could you define the market -- everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli," Scalia said.