Last week's terrorist attacks in Paris were religiously-based and they have brought to the fore an issue that France, and most of Europe, had chosen to ignore: determining how prevalent religious fundamentalism is.

A new paper says that creating Muslim zones where outsiders were not allowed is not the problem, nor is Muslim hostility toward 'out groups', like non-Muslims, and the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo office by the terrorists was not even attacking people who made fun of religion, or even western religion, it was instead an attack on the religious values of peace-loving Muslims, according to sociologist  Ruud Koopmans, director of the WZB Berlín Social Science Centre in Germany, writing in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Most people know that our biological functions use a circadian system comprised of a central clock located deep within the center of our brains and multiple clocks located in different parts of the body.   

When people fly to the other part of the world or work a night shift, those different biological clocks have not adjusted and so we get things like 'jet lag'. A small study may open new therapeutic avenues for improving the synchronization of the body's different biological clocks.  

A new white paper finds little to no evidence for the effectiveness of opioid drugs in the treatment of long-term chronic pain, despite the explosive recent growth in the use of such drugs. 

The paper, which constitutes the final report of a seven-member panel convened by the National Institutes of Health  last September, finds that many of the studies used to justify the prescription of these drugs were either poorly conducted or of an insufficient duration. That makes prolific use of these drugs surprising, says Dr. David Steffens, chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Connecticut and one of the authors of the study. When it comes to long-term pain, he says, "there's no research-based evidence that these medicines are helpful." 

A new paper says that human civilization has crossed four of nine so-called planetary boundaries as the result of human activity that put humanity in a "safe operating space." 

The four that are already beyond that point-of-no-return are climate change, the loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, and altered biogeochemical cycles like phosphorus and nitrogen runoff. That makes us 44 percent of the way on the path to doom.

It should be a wake-up call to policymakers that "we're running up to and beyond the biophysical boundaries that enable human civilization as we know it to exist," says co-author Steve Carpenter, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Limnology. 

Brownbanded bamboo sharks take the term "resourceful" to a whole new level. Biologists have found that a shark egg case dropped by an adult bamboo shark showed signs of healthy development. What surprised them was that the aquarium's female Chiloscyllium punctatum adults had spent nearly four years--45 months--in complete isolation from males.

Everyone who has lived in snow knows it is not as white as it looks - it's rarely white at all. Mixed in with the reflective flakes are tiny, dark particles of pollution. University of Washington scientists recently published the first large-scale survey of impurities in North American snow to see whether they might absorb enough sunlight to speed melt rates and influence climate.

The results, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, show that North American snow away from cities is similar to Arctic snow in many places, with more pollution in the U.S. Great Plains. They also show that agricultural practices, not just smokestacks and tailpipes, may have a big impact on snow purity.