The concept of randomness has intrigued great minds for as long as history of great thinkers has been recorded.  From the nature of wind to drunks running into lampposts on their way home, scholars have been intrigued with making random predictable. 

A group of chemists say they have challenged traditional interpretations of randomness by computationally generating random and mechanically rigid arrangements of two-dimensional hard disks, think pennies with no thickness, for the first time.

Researchers say they have clear and detailed evidence of the inequitable delivery of mental health care services for disadvantaged Australians. Introduced in 1975, Australia's national health insurance scheme Medicare (originally Medibank) was envisioned to deliver the most equitable and efficient means of providing health insurance coverage for all Australians.

For almost a century, scientists have been puzzled by a process that is crucial to much of the life in Earth's oceans: Why does calcium carbonate, the tough material of seashells and corals, sometimes take the form of calcite, and at other times form a chemically identical form of the mineral, called aragonite, that is more soluble -- and therefore more vulnerable to ocean acidification?

High up in the high Andes mountains of Argentina, a population has adapted to tolerate the toxic chemical arsenic. 

For thousands of years, in some regions of the Andes, people have been exposed to high levels of it, because arsenic in volcanic bedrock is released into the groundwater.

How could this population adapt to tolerate arsenic, a potent killer of such ill repute that it's often the overused plot-driver of many murder mysteries? 

How much overdetection is acceptable in cancer screening? A UK survey discussed in The BMJ this week affirms what we always knew, that responses are all over the map, depending on how the questions are framed.

The article is part of a series on over-detection (over-diagnosis) looking at the risks and harms to patients of expanding definitions of disease and increasing use of new diagnostic technologies. Over-detection describes cancerous lesions that are picked up and treated but would never have caused symptoms or become fatal in a person's lifetime. This is typically seen if the cancers are so slow growing that they would not have been detected if screening had not taken place.

Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) at Brookhaven National Laboratory only achieved first light a few weeks ago and already collaborators at the X-Ray Powder Diffraction (XPD) beamline have tested a setup that yielded data on thermoelectric materials. The work was part of the commissioning activities for the XPD beamline, a process that fine-tunes the settings of beamline equipment to ready the facility for first scientific commissioning experiments in mid-March on its way to full user operations later in the year.