The current government in Washington, D.C. may be dysfunctional but they still get together on some things. H.R. 5183, the Value-Based Insurance Design (VBID) for Better Care Act of 2014,could improve the health of patients with chronic illness while reducing what they spend on the medicines and tests they need most.

Everyone says the 21st century is a high-technology one and so government agencies have spent billions pushing Science, Technology, Engineering and Math degrees in college, which has led to a glut among academics, while the government has pushed more math and science education in high schools, which is leading to...more dropouts.

Writing in Educational Researcher, scholars at Washington University in St. Louis have found that more rigorous academics drive more students to drop out. 

Observations by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope of several stellar eruptions, called novae, firmly establish these relatively common outbursts almost always produce gamma rays, the most energetic form of light.

"There's a saying that one is a fluke, two is a coincidence, and three is a class, and we're now at four novae and counting with Fermi," said Teddy Cheung, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, and the lead author of a paper reporting the findings in the Aug. 1 edition of the journal Science.

One of the baffling electronic properties of the iron-based high-temperature superconductor barium iron nickel arsenide is that, at sufficiently low temperatures, it becomes a better conductor of electricity in some directions than in others.

The odd behavior, which has been documented in a number of materials, occurs at temperatures slightly higher than those needed to bring about magnetism; magnetism is believed to be essential for the origin of high-temperature superconductivity. A new study in Science Express offers the first evidence that the directionally dependent behavior arises from inherent physical properties of the material rather than from extraneous impurities, as had been previously suggested.

It has long been known that biomass burning – burning forests to create agricultural lands, burning savannah as a ritual , slash-and-burn agriculture and wildfires – figures into both climate change and public health but the degree of that contribution had never been comprehensively quantified and when science gets political, people may not always want to discuss the complete set of issues.

An anthropological wave has taken place, first in Asia that has now spread worldwide - humans, the most social species on the planet, have begun to gather in groups and ignore each other while communicating wirelessly with people doing the same ignoring of real people elsewhere.

The trend of sitting inches away on a train from other people and routinely ignoring each other while using social media is a social paradox. Why can such social agents be so antisocial?