In recent years, approximately 4.4 million women in the U.S. have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and women of childbearing age having the highest number of diagnoses. 

A new study has found that physiological changes during pregnancy reduce the effects of lamotrigine, a drug commonly prescribed for people diagnosed with bipolar disorder, making women more vulnerable to recurring episodes. The new findings will help psychiatrists and physicians prevent bipolar manic and depressive symptoms during pregnancy, which are risky for the health of the mother and her unborn child.

Despite what you may have read in the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets jumping on the 'sugar is bad' fad, sugar intake is off the hook in one area; nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. High-calorie diets promote the progression of this serious form of liver disease, but that isn't a sugar issue, it is a behavioral one.

Women consistently score lower than men on common assessments of conceptual understanding of physics but there is no clear reason why.

Controlling for student background and test-taking strategies provides little help and therefore claims that the causes of this gender gap have been determined (gender bias, stereotype threat) lack substance.

NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) was launched in early September and arrived in orbit around the Moon in October.

Its mission is to probe the Moon’s environment but it’s also carrying an interesting piece of technology - a new laser terminal. ESA’s Optical Ground Station in Spain’s Canary Islands was upgraded with an advanced laser terminal that can communicate with LADEE and they report that they have received signals from LADEE 400,000 KM away - at a rate many times faster than possible with traditional radio waves - which means 3 stations on Earth are using next-generation space communications.

The Smith Cloud, a gigantic streamer of hydrogen gas, is on a collision course with the Milky Way Galaxy., hurtling toward its doom at more than 540,000 miles per hour.

But that means the impact will happen in approximately 30 million years. Yet when it does, it will set off a spectacular burst of star formation.

All is not lost, though. It would first have to navigate through the halo of hot ionized gas surrounding the Milky Way, and to do that it has a secret weapon: A magnetic field deep in the cloud's interior which may protect it during its meteoric plunge into the disk. 

Astronomers have calculated the odds that, sometime during the next 50 years, a supernova occurring in our home galaxy will be visible from Earth and found the chances to be nearly 100% - and it will be visible from telescopes in the form of infrared radiation.