Epidemiologists who analyzed survey questionnaire responses came up with a new way to predict risk of lung cancer - the time you spent before lighting up the first time.

Lung cancer prediction is tricky business - though it is commonly assume that people who smoke will get lung cancer, shockingly few smokers do and almost half of lung cancer patients didn't smoke. There are standard markers that epidemiologists have used to match cancer risk - how many cigarettes per day and even cumulative exposure (pack-years).

The new survey results lead them to suggest that time before first light up may be a predictor for both light and heavy smokers. 

People who get a blacklegged tick bite may be getting more pathogens than they expected.  A new study found that ticks are almost twice as likely as previously believed to be infected with two pathogens—the bacterium that causes Lyme disease and the protozoan that causes babesiosis.  

Almost 30 percent of the ticks were infected with the agent of Lyme disease. One-third of these were also infected with at least one other pathogen. The agents of Lyme disease and babesiosis were found together in 7 percent of ticks.

If you could live longer, would you be weaned on an extreme, emaciating diet?

The search for the foundation of youth has been happening forever and a popular idea in recent years has been caloric restriction - mice weaned on starvation diets live long and a new study of the tiny nematode worm C. elegans finds results even more alarming - it triggered a state of arrested development.

Einstein's theory of relativity conceptualizes time as we would a spatial dimension, like height, width, and depth. But unlike dimensions, time seems to permit motion in only one direction: forward. 

This directional asymmetry — the "arrow of time" — is something of a head fake in theoretical physics. It's not a dimension if it's based on three dimensions and it isn't a dimension if it only goes one way. Like an ant walking around a wire in string theory, it makes for fine popular storytelling, but is it science? 

It's puzzling how some people can look at a baby and say 'she looks like her dad' - computers have historically been even more limited. While a four-year-old can look at a cartoon of a chicken and say "That's a chicken", that sort of problem stumps computers.

But next week at the IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Columbus, a University of Central Florida research team is going to show a facial recognition tool that is not only capable of matching pictures of parents and their children but can create accurate photos of missing children who will have aged.

Nature gets a bad rap, according to a new paper. For thousands of years, fickle weather has been blamed for tremendous suffering caused by massive flooding along the Yellow River, long known in China as the "River of Sorrow" and "Scourge of the Sons of Han."