With the rise of unions and salaried employees, piece work went out of fashion in American business.

Yet regulations and taxes and services have a cost, so more families than ever need to have both parents work time, which can lead to a 'time squeeze' when it comes to caring for children. A paper in the Journal of Marriage and Family examines if flexible working schemes help or add to this pressure.

Chemotherapy, the treatment of cancer using chemotherapeutic agents such as cytotoxic antineoplastic drugs, is one of the primary treatments for cancer - but it has drawbacks. Some of the most disturbing findings of recent studies of cancer survivors is the apparent prevalence of chemotherapy-associated adverse neurological effects, including vascular complications, seizures, mood disorders, cognitive dysfunctions, and peripheral neuropathies. 

In addition, chemotherapy triggers changes in ion channels on dorsal root ganglia and dorsal horn neurons that generate secondary changes resulting in neuropathic pains.

University of California - Davis biochemists have shown for the first time that the ergodic theorem can be demonstrated by a collection of individual protein molecules; specifically, a protein that unwinds DNA.

If you have ever used a GPS system to find a route to somewhere, you might have wondered on occasion how they can be so wrong - though it's often not the signal itself that is wrong.

Yet sometimes a distorted signal can be a good thing. By figuring out how messed up GPS satellite signals get when bouncing around in a storm, researchers have found a way to do something completely outside their original intent: measure and map the wind speeds of hurricanes.

Tick-borne illnesses are on the rise, or at least better reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lyme disease leads the pack, with some 35,000 cases reported annually but in the Northeast, the black-legged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) also infect people with other maladies, among them anaplasmosis, babesiosis, and now Powassan encephalitis, according to a new paper in Parasites and Vectors.

Powassan encephalitis is caused by Powassan virus and its variant, deer tick virus. The virus is spread to people by infected ticks, and can cause central nervous system disruption, encephalitis, and meningitis. There is a 10-15% fatality rate in reported cases, with many survivors suffering long-term neurological damage.

Satellite observations of the ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic haven't been around long enough, and prior methods were too inaccurate, to be able to say whether the loss of ice today will persist in the future.

Predictions of the contribution of both ice shields to the sea level by the year 2100 may be off by more than 35 centimeters - but whether they will be too high or too low is unclear. Too high is obviously no problem. Too low could be a real worry.