How common are taste metaphors? So common we don't even know they are metaphors.

When a kind smile is described as "sweet," or a resentful comment is considered "bitter," we most likely don't even think of those words as metaphors. But while it may seem to our ears that "sweet" by any other name means the same thing, new research shows that taste-related words actually engage the emotional centers of the brain more than literal words with the same meaning.

To read media accounts and claims by lawyers, everyone in the NFL except kickers is suffering some sort of brain damage. It was only a matter of time before those same claims were being made about pee-wee league football also/

While there are obviously cases in which that has happened, in-depth neurological examinations of 45 retired NFL players, ranging in age from 30-to 60-years old, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) along with comprehensive neuropsychological and neurological examinations, interviews, blood tests and APOE (apolipoprotein E) genotyping, found that most players haven't been affected. 

A new study finds that migratory birds that breed in Arctic Alaska are initiating nests earlier in the spring, and that snow melt occurring earlier in the season is a big reason for it.  

The researchers looked in nearly 2,500 nests of four shorebird species: semi-palmated sandpiper, red phalarope, red-necked phalarope, and pectoral sandpiper, and one songbird, the lapland longspur, and recorded when the first eggs were laid in each nest. The research occurred across four sites that ranged from the oilfields of Prudhoe Bay to the remote National Petroleum Reserve of western Arctic Alaska.

If there is a spill, the chemical makeup of wastewater generated by fracking could cause the release of tiny particles in soils that might bind heavy metals and pollutants, Cornell University researchers have found.

If you ask one scientist to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar, unless they have worked specifically on that problem before, their guess won't be very accurate. But if you ask 500 random people, the mean of their responses will be quite accurate.

If you ask experts to predict the future of science and technology, will they be more accurate? SciCast, the government crowd-sourcing project, hopes so. They are asking for participants to make their predictions.

Knowing where water vapor is in the atmosphere is one of many factors forecasters use to identify weather features and so the GOES Project has created animations that indicate where water vapor is moving over the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific oceans.

Observations from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) measure the local air temperature in kelvins (degrees Kelvin) at different layers of the atmosphere.