Coffee is a habit for more than 50 percent of Americans, who drink, on average, 2 cups per day. This widely consumed beverage is regularly investigated and debated for its impact on health conditions from breast cancer to heart disease. Among its complex effects on the body, coffee or its components have been linked to lower insulin and uric acid levels on a short-term basis or cross-sectionally. These and other mechanisms suggest that coffee consumption may affect the risk of gout, the most prevalent inflammatory arthritis in adult males.

MIT researchers have undertaken a first-of-its-kind analysis of bone's mechanical properties and discovered new things about how a bone absorbs energy. The insights gained from this work could lead to the creation of new, tougher materials.

The researchers' up-close-and-personal look at bone probes its fundamental building block—a corkscrew-shaped protein called collagen embedded with tiny nanoparticles of mineral—at the level of tens of nanometers, or billionths of a meter. A human hair, by comparison, is 80,000 nanometers in diameter.

Compared to math teachers in the high-achieving nations of Hong Kong and Japan, teachers in the United States offer less of certain supports that could help students learn more. This could contribute to the lower performance among U.S. students on international math tests, a UCI researcher discovered.

At four months, babies can tell whether a speaker has switched to a different language from visual cues alone, according to a University of British Columbia study.

Researcher Whitney Weikum found that infants are able to discern when a different language is spoken by watching the shapes and rhythm of the speaker's mouth and face movements.

If you do something positive for your mate, does it matter why? The answer is yes, according to new research from University of Rochester research assistant professor Heather Patrick. She will unveil a study at a Toronto conference later this month that shows both small sacrifices, like doing the dishes for your partner, and big ones, like moving across the country for a new job he or she really wants, mean more if you do them because you genuinely want to.

An extraordinary underwater trackway with 12 consecutive prints provides the most compelling evidence to-date that some dinosaurs were swimmers. The 15-meter-long trackway, located in La Virgen del Campo track site in Spain's Cameros Basin, contains the first long and continuous record of swimming by a non-avian therapod dinosaur.