How can a product which can be made for free be profitable? It happens all of the time. Words are free, for example, yet the Wall Street Journal sells good ones to its customers. Science 2.0 was built on open source tools but lots of consulting companies do the work for people less skilled in programming.

We've all seen athletes on the sidelines of a football game with a mask over their mouths inhaling oxygen. It may seem odd that anyone stands around for 60 seconds, moves for 10 and then has to go sit on a bunch with an oxygen tank but oxygen is life, and the belief is greater oxygen in the blood will mean greater athletic performance.

It may also mean more lung cancer, is it said. Why? People at higher elevations get less respiratory cancer than people at lower ones, for other cancers it is no different. Is that just epidemiology scrambling for curves to match again or is there something to it? Will boosting metabolism that way also boost the rates of cancer?

A recent study showed that a virtual reality cognitive training game could be a screening tool for patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) among a sample of older adults. Mild cognitive impairment  is a condition that often predates Alzheimer's disease and is characterized by memory loss and inability to execute complex activities such as financial planning. 

The CMS Collaboration at the LHC collider has recently measured a non-negligible rate for the fraction of Higgs boson decays into muon-tau pairs, as I reported in this article last summer. The observation is not statistically significant enough to cause an earthquake in the world of high-energy physics, and sceptics like myself just raised a gram of eyebrows at the announcement - oh yeah, just another 2-sigma effect. However, the matter becomes more interesting if there is a theoretical model which allows for the observed effect, AND if the model is not entirely crazy.

By Marsha Lewis, Inside Science

(Inside Science TV) – Everything from food, to air to water runs the risk of becoming contaminated. Now, chemists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have developed a technology that can detect and track dangerous particles in food and in the air.

“The DNA in the material can be used to identify those particles," said George Farquar, a chemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

With the technology, called DNA Trax, researchers create tiny sugar-based particles and label them with a unique DNA signature. The particles can be sprayed onto food or released into the air to track the source of contaminants.

Donate data like blood and we can look for answers in the patterns we find. nomadFra/Shutterstock

By Anya Skatova,University of Nottingham and James Goulding, University of Nottingham

Dearcmhara shawcrossi, Scottish dino-fish. Todd Marshall

By Stephen Brusatte, University of Edinburgh

Today my colleagues and I had the great privilege to announce a remarkable new discovery: a dolphin-like reptile that prowled the Middle Jurassic waters 170 million years ago.

Many cancer survivors face physical and mental challenges, such as sexual dysfunction or anxiety about getting cancer again or financial hardships, even decades after the treatment is ended.  

Finding ways to help will become increasingly important because more cancer patients are living many years after treatment. The number of U.S. survivors is expected to top 19 million by 2024. While most survivors do well after treatment, some experience continuing problems that can significantly impair their quality of life well beyond the 5-year survival milestone. The problems and challenges can vary by the type of cancer patients had and the treatments they received. 

Why do discussions of creative genius so often happen about white male writers such as Jonathan Franzen? AAP Image/Harper Collins

By Natalie Kon-yu, Victoria University

Recent results of a study finds that that sensor changes have significantly biased temperature observations from the Snowpack Telemetry (SNOTEL) station network.
More than 700 SNOTEL sites monitor temperature and snowpack across the mountainous western U.S. SNOTEL provides critical data for water supply forecasts. Researchers often use SNOTEL data to study mountain climate trends and impacts to mountain hydrology and ecology. 

University of Montana and Montana Climate Office researcher Jared Oyler and colleagues applied statistical techniques to account for biases introduced when equipment was switched at SNOTEL sites in the mid-1990s to mid-2000s.