There's good news and there's bad news to deliver. Which do you want to give first? What if you are getting it? The best strategy depends on whether you are the giver or receiver of the bad news, and if the news-giver wants the receiver to act on the information, according to a new paper.

The process of giving or getting bad news is difficult for most people, particularly when news-givers feel unsure about how to proceed with the conversation, psychologists Dr. Angela M. Legg and Professor Kate Sweeny note. "The difficulty of delivering bad news has inspired extensive popular media articles that prescribe 'best' practices for giving bad news, but these prescriptions remain largely anecdotal rather than empirically based."

Researchers in a new paper say that one way to gauge the extent of prescription opioid pain reliever abuse is to count the number of health care providers.

Climate understanding of the past is based primarily on ice cores.  By studying information about Earth's climate and greenhouse gases  in past, scientists can understand better how temperature responds to changes in greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere and make better predictions about how climate will change in the future. 

Researcher have now identified regions in Antarctica they say could store information from as far back as 1.5 million years, almost twice as old as the oldest ice core drilled to date. 

If you have wondered why a disease like anorexia seems to impact primarily middle class white girls, a new paper in JAMA Pediatrics will shed some new light on the issue.

A new paper analyzed survey responses of 5,527 teenage males from across the U.S.and found that 17.9% of these young men are suffering under the yoke of female body expectations and are extremely concerned about their weight and physique. These boys were found to be more likely to start engaging in risky behaviors, including drug use and frequent binge drinking.

Every organism needs nitrogen to survive and grow and many organisms do not have the ability to obtain nitrogen from molecular nitrogen (N2), the major component in the atmosphere because they lack the nitrogen fixation pathway and have to rely on supply of nitrogen that has been fixed by others.

The availability of fixed nitrogen, in the form of ammonium, nitrite and nitrate, consequently often limits primary production in the environment. That's one of the reasons why many fertilizers are rich in fixed nitrogen.

While politics is not yet post-racial - every criticism of the politics of a minority member of government is labeled racism - dating seems to be, according to UC San Diego sociologist Kevin Lewis after looking at patterns of 126,134 US users of the dating site OkCupid.com