A group of researchers from Indiana University's Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research (CHPPR) say they have found that support for government health insurance for individuals under age 65 remains virtually the same regardless of how the plan is described or how involved the government would be.   So support is not a 'framing' issue, public relations or political roadblocks, it seems to be a fundamental disagreement about what the government can and cannot effectively do - and that falls along political party lines.

The science is in and men are easy.

Men are far more interested in casual sex than women, according to Dr. Achim Schützwohl, from the Department of Psychology at Brunel University in the UK, and a team who published their results in Human Nature.  Their research showed that men are more likely than women to report having had casual sex and they express a greater desire for it than do women.

But men need to be exceptionally attractive to tempt women to consider casual sex, they say.

Biology has just gotten a new set of standards for graphically representing biological information, biology's equivalent of the circuit diagram in electronics.

Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and their colleagues say this visual language should make it easier to exchange complex information, so that models are accurate, efficient and readily understandable. The new standard, called the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN), is published today in Nature Biotechnology.

100 years ago you had to be rich to be fat.  Now apparently you have to be rich to stay thin.  And women add more pounds being poor than anyone.

A nationwide study that followed participants for 14 years correlates the U.S. Food Stamp Program to obesity among its users.

Researchers found that the average user of food stamps had a Body Mass Index (BMI) 1.15 points higher than non-users. The link between food stamps and higher weight was almost entirely based on women users, who averaged 1.24 points higher BMI than those not in the program, the study found. For an average American woman, this would mean an increase in weight of 5.8 pounds.

Magnetotactic bacteria are the smallest organisms to use a biological compass but exactly how these bacteria create their cellular magnets is a mystery. In a study published online in Genome Research, scientists have used genome sequencing to unlock new secrets about these magnetic microbes that could accelerate biotechnology and nanotechnology research.

Language networks are built based on different principles and, for the most part, are designed to be scale-free.  Global statistical properties of language networks are independent of linguistic structure and typology so do linguistic structures really influence the statistical properties of a language network? More concretely, does semantic or conceptual network have the same properties as a syntactic one?

Researchers at the Institute of Applied Linguistics at Communication University of China say they have shown that dynamic semantic network of human language is also small-world and scale-free but it is different from syntactic network in hierarchical structure and node's degree correlation.