Cholesterol-lowering statins have transformed the treatment of heart disease. But while the decision to use the drugs in patients with a history of heart attacks and strokes is mostly clear-cut, that choice can be a far trickier proposition for the tens of millions of Americans with high cholesterol but no overt disease.

Now a report from preventive cardiologists at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere offers a set of useful tips for physicians to help their patients make the right call.

The report, published March 30 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, combines the experts' collective clinical wisdom with previously published research on the benefits and potential downsides to long-term statin use.

A new paper creates a link between exposure to pesticide residues from fruits and vegetables and semen quality. 

Men who ate fruits and vegetables with higher levels of pesticide residues, like strawberries, spinach, and peppers, had lower sperm count and a lower percentage of normal sperm than those who ate produce with lower residue levels, according to the new paper.

Researchers have tested a range of neuroprosthetic devices, from wheelchairs to robots to advanced limbs, that work with their users to intelligently perform tasks.

They work by decoding brain signals to determine the actions their users want to take, and then use advanced robotics to do the work of the spinal cord in orchestrating the movements. The use of shared control - new to neuroprostheses - "empowers users to perform complex tasks," says José del R. Millán, who presented the new work at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) conference in San Francisco today.

In ancient times, attributing effects to the moon made some sense. If it could change tides, which everyone except Galileo recognized it did, why not cause effects in people? 

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a group of climate change experts representatively selected from regions around the world that periodically releases Assessment Reports in order to inform policymakers and the public about the latest evidence for climate change. The publication of each report is a key event in the debate about climate change, but their reception and coverage in the media has varied widely.

A new paper has for the first time analyzed how Twitter, TV and newspapers reported the IPCC's climate evidence. Understanding how media coverage varies is important because people's knowledge and opinions on climate change are influenced by how the media reports on the issue.

Natural wetlands usually emit methane and sequester carbon dioxide. Anthropogenic interventions, in particular the conversion of wetlands for agriculture, result in a significant increase in CO2 emissions, which overcompensate potential decreases in methane emission. A large international research team now calculated that the conversion of arctic and boreal wetlands into agricultural land would result in an additional cumulative radiative forcing of about 0,1 MilliJoule (mJ) per square meter for the next 100 years.