The insurance industry and its $4.6 trillion in revenues isn't going to be caught unaware by climate change.  They are all about risk.

Sometimes that can have unfortunate effects in the real world. In 2009, former Vice-President Al Gore talked at an AAAS conference and put up a slide showing climate change projections and no one could figure out where he got it.  It turned out the slide was from an insurer, not science data, and he removed the slide from later presentations.

Hurricane Sandy is the most recent cited U.S. example of the kinds of increasing liabilities posed by attributing weather events to a changing climate.

The plague-causing bacteria Yersinia pestis evades detection and establishes a stronghold without setting off the body's early alarms but new discoveries reported this week help explain how the stealthy agent of Black Death avoids tripping a self-destruct mechanism inside germ-destroying cells. 

Normally, certain defender cells are programmed to burst if they are either invaded by or detect the presence of pathogens. This host defense mechanism called pyroptosis ("going up in flames") eliminates places for the germs to reproduce. As it splits open, the cell spills antimicrobial chemicals and emits signals to alert of an attack and its precise location. Tissues become inflamed as more cells arrive to fight the infection. 

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a self-taught Indian mathematician known for intuiting extraordinary numerical patterns and connections without using proofs or modern mathematical tools. Instead, the devout Hindu genius said that his findings were divine and were revealed to him in dreams by the goddess Namagiri.

The ability to accurately recall the shapes and spatial relationships of objects has been shown to be reduced by long-term use of anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS), according to a recent paper. 

Quantum entanglement is a central principle of quantum physics - the science of sub-atomic particles. Multiple particles, such as photons, are connected with each other even when they are very far apart and what happens to one particle can have an effect on the other one at the same moment, even though these effects cannot be used to send information faster than light.

In 1935, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, referred to in the shorthand form EPR today, published a thought experiment designed to show that quantum mechanics, by itself, is not sufficient to describe reality. 

Blocking even a single tiny blood vessel in the brain can harm neural tissue and alter behavior, says a study from U.C. San Diego.

All is not lost, though. The effects can be mitigated by  the FDA-approved drug memantine, suggesting treatment that could slow the progress of dementia associated with cumulative damage to miniscule blood vessels that feed brain cells.