Women who are pregnant or trying to fall pregnant and taking a folic acid supplement may be at risk of reducing their folate benefit through sun exposure, a new QUT study has warned.

In a paper titled Exposure to solar ultraviolet radiation is associated with decreased folate status in women of childbearing age, published in the Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B:Biology, QUT researchers found UV exposure significantly depleted folate levels.

Professor Michael Kimlin and Dr David Borradale, from QUT's AusSun Research Lab, said the study of 45 young healthy women in Brisbane aged 18 to 47, showed high rates of sun exposure accounted up to a 20 per cent reduction in folate levels.

There was a time when advocates knew that linking weather events to climate change was a bad idea; it left the science open to criticism if Al Gore was giving a talk on global warming during a blizzard.

Yet since 2012, when SuperStorm Sandy was linked to climate change and a reason to vote for President Obama, claims that every weather event, be it drought or flood, hot or cold, is evidence of global warming, have gotten more prevalent.

Extending national breast cancer screening programs to women over the age of 70 does not decrease cancers detected at advanced stages, according to new research at the European Breast Cancer Conference.

Instead, extending screening programs to older women results in a large proportion of women being over-treated, and at risk from the harmful effects of such treatment, because these women were more likely to die from other causes than from any tumors detected in the early stages of growth.

If you frequently experience cognitive lapses, there may be good news; psychologists say forgetting someone's name or losing your keys could be linked to the DRD2 gene. 

Those who have a certain variant of this gene are more easily distracted and experience a significantly higher incidence of lapses due to a lack of attention. "Such short-term memory lapses are very common, but some people experience them particularly often," said Prof. Dr. Martin Reuter from the department for Differential and Biological Psychology at the University of Bonn in their statement.

A new psychology paper research finds that adolescent females who are either obese or depressed are more likely to develop the other.

By assessing a statewide sample of more than 1,500 males and females in Minnesota over a period of more than 10 years, the authors found that depression occurring by early adolescence in females predicts obesity by late adolescence. Meanwhile, obesity that occurs by late adolescence in females predicts the onset of depression by early adulthood. No significant associations between the two disorders across time were found in males during the study.

Seabirds, sea turtles and marine mammals can be unintended victims – by-catch – of global fishing. Accidental entanglement in fishing gear is the single biggest threat to some species in these groups, according to a new analysis co-authored by Stanford biology Professor Larry Crowder that provides a global map of this by-catch.