Framing alternative energy in terms of lives saved can be risky business.   People die ... thousands from guns, tens of thousands from cars and a lot more than that from malpractice.

In the 700,000 employees in the US energy sector, 130 can be saved by switching to renewable energy, according to a commentary by Medical College of Wisconsin researchers in the August 19, 2009, Journal of the American Medical Association. 

It is estimated that at least 10 percent of the population may be tone deaf – unable to sing in tune.  A new finding identifies a particular brain circuit that appears to be absent in these individuals.

Nerve fibers in the neural "highway" called the arcuate fasciculus that link perception and motor regions of the brain are disconnected in tone-deaf people, according to new research in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Turns out that Dr. Scholl's Freeze Away doesn't work on worry-warts.  So for many people, personality traits like chronic worrying can lead to earlier death, at least in part because these people are more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking, according to research from Purdue University.

"Research shows that higher levels of neuroticism can lead to earlier mortality, and we wanted to know why," said Daniel K. Mroczek, (pronounced Mro-ZAK) a professor of child development and family studies. "We found that having worrying tendencies or being the kind of person who stresses easily is likely to lead to bad behaviors like smoking and, therefore, raise the mortality rate.

How's this for something new: instead of a steel dental pick poking and prodding around your teeth at you next dentist appointment, imagine a laser doing all that work pain-free.

Thanks to a group of researchers in Australia and Taiwan, this may be possible. They have developed a new way to analyze the health of human teeth using lasers. As described in Optics Express, by measuring how the surface of a tooth responds to laser-generated ultrasound, they can evaluate the mineral content of tooth enamel -- the semi-translucent outer layer of a tooth that protects the underlying dentin.

NASA scientists have discovered glycine, a fundamental building block of life, in samples of comet Wild 2 returned by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.

"Glycine is an amino acid used by living organisms to make proteins, and this is the first time an amino acid has been found in a comet," said Dr. Jamie Elsila of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Our discovery supports the theory that some of life's ingredients formed in space and were delivered to Earth long ago by meteorite and comet impacts."

A University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston study suggests that ancient Chinese herbal formulas used primarily for cardiovascular indications including heart disease may produce large amounts of artery-widening nitric oxide.

Nitric oxide is crucial to the cardiovascular system because it signals the inner walls of blood vessels to relax, which facilitates the flow of blood through the heart and circulatory system. The messenger molecule also eliminates dangerous clots, lowers high blood pressure and reduces artery-clogging plaque formation.