Combining two innovative technologies, a team of engineers have made steps toward a better recipe for synthetic replacement cartilage in joints. Farshid Guilak, a professor of orthopedic surgery and biomedical engineering at Duke University, and Xuanhe Zhao, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, found a way to create artificial replacement tissue that mimics both the strength and suppleness of natural cartilage. 

Prisons have started to cut back on fruits and some vegetables for felons because they have discovered how to make booze with them. 

It isn't as great as it sounds. Emergency unit physicians have report severe botulism poisoning from a batch of potato-based "wine" (also known as pruno) cooked up in a Utah prison. The only thing crazier than inject botulism into your face is putting it in your stomach.

It could be in a billion years, it could start tomorrow, but physicists have long predicted that the universe may one day collapse, and that everything in it will be compressed to a small hard ball.

Like a lot of things, it just takes a little mathematics to conclude that the risk of a collapse is even greater than previously thought.

A new species of fossil horse from 4.4 million-year-old fossil-rich deposits in Ethiopia, 
Eurygnathohippus woldegabrieli, was about the size of a small zebra, Eurygnathohippus woldegabrieli, had three-toed hooves and grazed the grasslands and shrubby woods in the Afar Region, according to its naming in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The horse fills a gap in the evolutionary history of horses but is also important for documenting how old a fossil locality is and in reconstructing habitats of human forebears of the time, said Scott Simpson, professor of anatomy at Case Western Reserve's School of Medicine, and co-author of the research. "This horse is one piece of a very complex puzzle that has many, many pieces."

Ignoring meaningless platitudes like 'age is all in your mind', age is more than a number of years. 'You are as young as you feel' may be more apt because factors such as health, cognitive function and disability rates are important ways to measure age in all its dimensions.

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
population researchers Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov seek to reorient the way demographers study population aging, providing a new toolbox of methodologies for demographers to better understand the impacts of an aging population on society, by measuring based instead on characteristics of people that change with age, including life expectancy, health, cognitive function, and other measures. 

Approximately 1 in 88 children are diagnosed as being somewhere on the autism spectrum. One hypothesis about autism is that a hyperactive immune system results in elevated levels of inflammation and may contribute to the disorder. Approximately one third of those on the autism spectrum, slightly above placebo levels, show a clinical improvement in symptoms in response to a fever.