There are not a lot of new stories to be found by the humanities in ancient parchments, but millions of documents stored in archives could trace agricultural development across the centuries, thanks to increasingly progressive genetic sequencing techniques.

Thanks to sequencing, vital information can be derived from the DNA of the parchment on which they are written.

Women over the age of 70 with certain early-stage breast cancers don't get much benefit from radiation therapy, according to studies, but they still get it.  The reason is because doctors were able to make decisions that overruled the published evidence and every patient wanted to take no chances.

Now, with government increasingly controlling health care in the United States, the search is one for ways to lessen such "defensive medicine" and cut costs. The problem is that it will be difficult to tell doctors and patients they won't get what was previously considered standard care under a free market system now that more treatments are determined by government panels.

Psychology lacks the methodological rigor of science, but bold claims are popular in corporate media and so they become paper of consumer belief. One recent popular claim is that being bilingual is
a cognitive advantage.

The claims are so popular that you will have a hard time getting published in psychology journals if you debunk them. 

Writing in Psychological Science, scholars suggest that publication bias in favor of positive results of the
bilingual-advantage
 hypothesis are skewing the overall literature on bilingualism and cognitive function. Whenever publication bias exists, it is good for creating the belief in a consensus or getting people to take action, but it is bad for public acceptance of science.

What made the wealthy elites in San Fransisco and Seattle who deny the benefits of child vaccines suddenly clamor for government action to create more vaccines? Two cases of Ebola in the United States.

Though 12,000 people died of heart disease in that same time, and their states were leading the nation in preventable debilitating childhood diseases, it got little media, and therefore consumer, attention. There is a reason why. In the modern environment of surveillance medicine and the focus on risk factors for disease, the lines between health and illness have become blurry and even skewed, according to sociological surveys. 

Using commercial solar cells, researchers have converted over 40 percent of the sunlight hitting a solar system into electricity, the highest efficiency ever reported.

A study has found that elite Kenyan athletes have greater brain oxygenation during periods of maximum physical effort, which contributes to their success in long-distance races.

Dr. Jordan Santos-Concejero, of the Department of Physical Education and Sport at the University of the Basque Country carried out the research to analyze the response of cerebral oxygenation at maximum and progressive rhythms amongst elite Kenyan runners from the Kalenjin tribe.