The heated national debate on complex issues related to costs of health care was ignited by the implementation the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) in January 2014. There is no national system that adequately records and quantifies the wide range of issues related to health care costs, so the arguments have been based primarily on undocumented opinion.

As always, anecdotal reports related to health issues get the most attention. Since such reports are most often at best unreliable and at worst misleading, accepting them as fact adds to the combative unproductive nature of the public debate. As a result, academic economist estimates of the future costs under the ACA have varied from large increases to considerable reductions.

A new study has found that removing native forest and putting in farms can accelerate erosion so dramatically that in a few decades as much soil is lost as would naturally occur over thousands of years.

Had you stood on the banks of the Roanoke, Savannah, or Chattahoochee Rivers a hundred years ago, you'd have seen a lot more clay soil washing down to the sea than before European settlers began clearing trees and farming there in the 1700s. Around the world, deforestation and food productions have been blamed for increasing erosion above its natural rate.

In 1833, Constantin Wilhelm Lambert Gloger published his key observation that warm-blooded animals tend to be more heavily pigmented or darker the closer they live to the equator.

This week, University of Pittsburgh researchers Matthew Koski and Tia-Lynn Ashman proved that the same phenomenon described by Gloger exists among flowers. One of the reasons investigators had not pursued proof of Gloger's rule in flowers is that pollinators, such as bees, don't see what we see when they look at a flower. They see in the ultraviolet as well as visible ranges. What appears bright yellow to a person can appear dark or patterned to a bee.

A study using geckos has found that evolution can downgrade or entirely remove adaptations that have been previously acquired, giving the species new survival advantages. 

Since it is only January 8th, most people have not yet given up on their New Year's Resolution to get in shape so this is still relevant.

Despite what supplement salespeople - and an alarming number of nutritionists in 2015 who make money promoting them - the only ways to lose weight are to starve or work up a sweat. And working up a sweat is the smart way to go.

Before you pack your gym bag, pack your brain with some crazy facts about sweat, courtesy of American Chemical Society's Sophia Cai in the Speaking of Chemistry series.

Maybe fat gets a bad rap. Immune responses matter but when it comes to skin infections, those response may depend greatly upon what lies beneath, according to a paper published in Science. Fat cells below the skin help protect us from bacteria, they write.

Richard Gallo, MD, PhD, professor and chief of dermatology at UC San Diego School of Medicine, and colleagues have uncovered a previously unknown role for dermal fat cells, known as adipocytes: They produce antimicrobial peptides that help fend off invading bacteria and other pathogens.