Evidence from human famines and animal studies suggests that starvation can affect the health of descendants of famished individuals, but how such an acquired trait might be transmitted from one generation to the next?

A new study involving roundworms finds that starvation induces specific changes in small RNAs and that these changes are inherited through at least three consecutive generations, apparently without any DNA involvement. The paper in Cell offers new evidence that the biology of inheritance is more complicated than previously thought.

Weddings are a lot of stress, primarily for women but, in 19 states, lots of men as well.

Math can ease some of the burden - at least when it comes to cutting the cake. But first let's show how it works with just two people. Believe it or not this topic has generated a substantial amount of literature in the last 20 years. A cake is, of course, a metaphor for a divisible, heterogeneous good to a mathematician, and there an 'adjusted winner' can be created.

Cigarette smokers are more likely to commit suicide than people who don't smoke. People with psychiatric disorders have higher suicide rates and tend to smoke, so the connection is so simple an epidemiologist could make it.

But psychiatrists now say that smoking itself may increase suicide risk and that bans and higher taxes on smoking cause suicide rates to drop. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that in 2010, nearly 40,000 people killed themselves in the US and every death that occurs in the United States is recorded in a database managed by the National Center for Health Statistics. The authors classified each suicide death based on the state where the victim had lived, as well as how aggressive that state's tobacco policies were.

By measuring how fast Earth conducts electricity and seismic waves, researchers have created a detailed picture of Mount Rainier's deep volcanic plumbing and partly molten rock that will erupt again someday.

In an odd twist, the image appears to show that at least part of Mount Rainier's partly molten magma reservoir is located about 6 to 10 miles northwest of the 14,410-foot volcano, which is 30 to 45 miles southeast of the Seattle-Tacoma area.

But that could be because the 80 electrical sensors used for the experiment were placed in a 190-mile-long, west-to-east line about 12 miles north of Rainier. So the main part of the magma chamber could be directly under the peak, but with a lobe extending northwest under the line of detectors.

Niacin has been a mainstay cholesterol therapy for 50 years but it should no longer be prescribed for most patients due to potential increased risk of death, dangerous side effects and no benefit in reducing heart attacks and strokes, according to an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Cardiologists have developed a minimally invasive gene transplant procedure that changes unspecialized heart cells into 'biological pacemaker' cells that keep the heart beating. 

The laboratory animal research is the result of a dozen years of research with the goal of developing biological treatments for patients with heart rhythm disorders who currently are treated with surgically implanted pacemakers.

In the United States, an estimated 300,000 patients receive pacemakers every year.  If future research is successful, the procedure could be ready for human clinical studies in about three years.