An imbalance of female sex hormones caused by vegetarian foods like soy may be contributing to high levels of male obesity, according to a recent paper.

In US states that strongly embrace myriad anti-science beliefs, like California, Washington and New York, dangerous preventable diseases like Whooping Cough have come roaring back after a long hiatus, due to a belief by cultural elites that as long as uneducated poor people get vaccines, things will be fine.

It is going to take a lot to combat the entrenched mentality that causes some to distrust science and medicine, because groups have spent a lot of money promoting conspiracy stories about pharmaceutical companies and doctors and selling their 'alternative' medicine. It will take education, awareness and nurses can help, write Emily Peake, APRN, MSN, FNP-C, CLC, and Lisa K. McGuire, MSN, MBA-HCM, RN.

Titan, the most famous moon around Saturn, has an atmosphere that is a brownish-orange haze. The dirty color comes from a mixture of hydrocarbons, molecules that contain hydrogen and carbon, and nitrogen-carrying chemicals called nitriles. The family of hydrocarbons already has hundreds of thousands of members, identified from plants and fossil fuels on Earth, and even more could exist.

The class of drug known as p110δ inhibitors, currently being used to treat leukemia, has the unexpected side-effect of boosting immune responses against many different cancers, according to a study led by pharmaceutical company Genentech in San Francisco

p110δ inhibitors have shown such remarkable efficacy against certain leukemias in recent clinical trials that patients on the placebo were switched to the real drug - but they have not been tested in other types of cancer.  The p110δ enzyme is a member of the PI3-kinase family, and is sometimes called PI3Kδ. p110δ and the other PI3Ks are hot drug targets for the pharmaceutical industry as they are implicated in many cancers and are readily druggable.

Two studies  presented today at the Goldschmidt 2014 geochemistry conference in Sacramento show that the movement rate of plates carrying the Earth's crust may not be constant over time. That could provide a new explanation for the patterns observed in the speed of evolution and has implications for the interpretation of climate models.  

The Earth's continental crust is an archive of Earth's history and it is the basis for studies on rock formation, the atmosphere and the fossil record - but it is not clear when and how regularly crust formed since the beginning of Earth history 4.5 billion years ago. 

Do you know where the solar system ends? Not really. We know it does, but picking a hard boundary is difficult.

And when it comes to anthropogenic emissions and air quality, it is hard to know for sure also. How much of CO2 is natural? How are we past the tipping point for CO2 levels while warming has not risen? 

How are emissions calculated? Different ranges of emission fluxes have been proposed by several studies, which have provided emissions at different spatial and temporal scales. Reconciling them all is difficult An EU funded project called Monitoring Atmospheric Composition&Climate II (MACC ll) seeks to hone in on real answers.