If health care is free, more people will go to the doctor and that means longer waiting for people who truly need it. An overburdened health care system would then have to hire less-qualified people to meet the needs, and that is bad.  If the president suddenly says every family will get a three star-chef, for example, they won't actually get a three-star chef, they'll get a McDonald's fry cook dressed like a chef.

Yet we spend a lot for great care.  Some contend Americans get too much health care under the current system, meaning rationing under a nationalized system would not really hurt anyone.  Who is making that claim?  Economists in favor of government health care, mostly.

Are students inspired to go into physics because of a television show like "The Big Bang Theory"?  Probably not, or else 60% of America would be cops and lawyers.

But chemistry has a bad reputation, argues a recent editorial in Nature Chemistry, and "Breaking Bad" gets some of the blame for keeping its reputation bad.   It's a cable show on AMC, so not exactly on the minds of all that many people, but it chronicles the transformation of Walter White from suburban high school chemistry teacher to crystal meth dealer and criminal mastermind who uses his chemistry expertise (poisons, noxious gases, and acid) to eliminate rival meth dealers. 

Researchers have created a protein 'switch' that instructs cancer cells to produce their own anti-cancer medication and lab tests showed it can activate a powerful cell-killing drug when the device detects a marker linked to cancer.

The goal in cancer treatment is to some day cause cancer cells to self-destruct  and spare healthy tissue, damage to all tissue being the downside to current treatments like chemotherapy.

In Doomsday Comet Elenin Goes Out With A Whimper we dismissed concerns from prophets of doom that a tiny comet 22 million miles away would make any difference in our lives - but we never said anything at all about a sunspot and what it might due to your wireless PS3 connection at a crucial moment in "Gears of War".

Behemoth sunspot 1302 unleashed another strong flare on Saturday morning, an X1.9-category blast at 5:40 am EDT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash.

While concern about water is always real, scare tactics like virtual water do more harm than good for rational policy making. Objective analyses show we don't have a food issue looming that science and technology can't address.

A new study in Nature shows that genetic parasites invaded the mammalian genome more than 100 million years ago and dramatically changed the way mammals reproduce.

The molecular changes allowed mammals to carry their developing young within the womb rather than laying them in nests or carrying them around in pouches - the uterus was transformed. 

The findings published online Sept. 25 in the journal Nature Genetics describe in unprecedented detail the molecular changes that allowed mammals to carry their developing young within the safety of the womb rather than laying them in nests or carrying them around in pouches.