We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology laughs at that notion. The next time you go on vacation, a new tool can show you how many places your vacation destination has been. 

Paleolatitude.org can do that, right down to the movements of small tectonic and ‘lost continents’ now called Greater Adria, the Tethys Himalayas or Argoland, which we know as  folded rocks in the mountain ranges of the Mediterranean, the Himalayas, and Indonesia. 

One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than rolls of dice suggest. A new study of the mimicry of several distantly-related South American rainforest butterfly and moth species with similar wing color patterns that may warn away predators (it's not a costumed bluff, the moths and butterflies are actually toxic to birds) found that they reused the same two genes - ivory and optix - to evolve near identical color patterns.

There are many hypothetical particles proposed to explain dark matter and one idea to explore how strongly hypothetical dark photons interact with normal photons wouldn't even involve a new and expensive dedicated facility, says Tokyo Metropolitan University Associate Professor Wen Yin.

Chronic pain is reported by over 20 percent of the global population but there is no scientific determination of what that even means.

There are metrics but standard 0-to-10 scales and questionnaires are subjective and basically only useful for justifying treatments to insurance companies, they are clinically not much help.

Pain patients were demonized by the Obama administration in their war on Big Pharma and "opiods" that many in Congress now claim to support and that may be why both doctors and patients minimize their symptoms on official forms. No patient wants to be told their pain is just recreational desire while doctors are the easy targets for government. That plus general recall bias and confusion about what a pain scale really means clouds the issue.

An analysis of 6.14 million maternal-child health records  has linked prescription medications to higher rates of Autism Spectrum Disorder in offspring. 

Sterol biosynthesis–inhibiting medications (SBIMs) inhibit the cholesterol synthesis pathway and are include antidepressants, antipsychotics, anxiolytics, beta-blockers and statins; aripiprazole, atorvastatin, bupropion, buspirone, fluoxetine, haloperidol, metoprolol, nebivolol, pravastatin, propranolol, rosuvastatin, sertraline, simvastatin, cariprazine and trazodone. 

These include some of the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States, accounting for more than 400 million annual prescriptions. 

Fibromyalgia is the term for a poorly-understood condition where people experience pain and fatigue while moving but have no testable inflammation or damage. Because fatigue is a non-specific symptom, fibromyalgia becomes a 'diagnosis of exclusion', where pain persists but testable conditions are ruled out. It is said to affect about four percent of the population.