Several times a year I find myself exiting the Florida’s Turnpike at Yeehaw Junction and heading south.  When I get to the small town of Okeechobee I take a left and head down Route 98 through Florida’s extensive agricultural backyard.  Flanked by Lake Okeechobee on the west and the affluent cities of the Atlantic coast off to the east, the small towns nestled in this sliver of land support vibrant production of sweet corn, cattle, lettuce, and sugarcane. Cane-derived sugar ends up in many cupboards as table sugar, and also is found in many consumer products.  

By now we are all used to seeing its more or less successful results on Italian and international celebrities, but in fact the market of Botox-based procedures (cosmetic treatments that exploit the effects of type A botulin toxin) involves a large number of individuals. Just to give an idea, about 250,ooo procedures were done in Italy in 2014. It is therefore natural to wonder about the possible side effects of this practice. One fairly unpredictable consequence concerns the emotional domain, and in particular the perception of emotional information and facial expressions.

Researchers from the University of Chicago have shown that inhibiting autophagy, a self-devouring process used by cells to degrade large intra-cellular cargo, effectively blocks tumor cell migration and breast cancer metastasis in tumor models. In a study, published May 12, 2016, in the journal Cell Reports, they demonstrate that the process is essential for tumor metastasis and describe the mechanisms that connect autophagy to cell migration.

Same-sex sexual behaviour is common in animals but puzzles evolutionary biologists since it doesn't carry the same obvious benefits as heterosexual courtship behavior that leads to mating and production of offspring. A study from Uppsala University sheds new light on the pervasiveness of same-sex sexual behaviour in the animal kingdom.

Friends of the Earth, an activism group generally devoted to impeding science and progress, is excited that the Texas Clean Energy Project, a carbon capture and sequestration facility in Texas, has support from the Department of Energy that is set to expire.

Having analyzed the data collected for more than three decades, scientists managed to show that the effects of climate changes in the Arctic may come out on a completely different continent, a few thousand kilometers away from the Arctic ice. One of the authors, Eldar Rahimberdiev, researcher at the Biological faculty of MSU, says that the work is unique, as earlier scholars did not consider these problems so complex.

Although ski season is behind us, serious skiers are already looking ahead to next season and searching for ways to shave split-seconds off their race times. Now scientists may have a new way to help -- perhaps in time for the next Winter Olympics. One team has determined how the microscopic texture of the bottoms of skis could affect their speed, depending on snow temperature. Their study appears in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Why is the WebMD website so successful? Last week, John Oliver ridiculed them for promoting every suspect association between anything and cancer, without any analysis or critical thinking. 

A new paper paper in the journal Communication Research may provide some answers. They are publishing churnalism and advertorials about science and health, and that is far more effective than the numerous advertisements they carry.

I am told by a TOTEM manager that this is public news and so it can be blogged about - so here I would like to explain a rather cunning plan that the TOTEM and the CMS collaborations have put together to enhance the possibilities of a discovery, and a better characterization, of the particle that everybody hopes is real, the 750 GeV resonance seen in photon pairs data by ATLAS and CMS in their 2015 data.

Diagnoses of celiac disease (CD), an autoimmune disease, are increasing, no real surprise after not one but two bestselling food books based on suspect studies claimed wheat is poison.