L'Aquila is still in repair. Roberto Taddeo

By Lawrence Torcello, Rochester Institute of Technology

It has been five years since an earthquake hit the Italian city of L’Aquila leaving 309 people dead.

In the aftermath one public official and six earthquake scientists were charged with multiple counts of manslaughter. Each defendant was sentenced to six years in jail.

King's College Chapel: beauty, art, profundity – but truth? Tom Thai, CC BY-SA

By Simon Blackburn, University of Cambridge

Doubling and even nearly tripling saturated fat in diets does not drive up total levels of saturated fat in the blood, according to a controlled diet study.

The researchers found that total saturated fat in the blood did not increase - and went down in most people - despite being increased in the diet when carbohydrates were reduced. Palmitoleic acid, a fatty acid associated with unhealthy metabolism of carbohydrates that can promote disease, went down with low-carb intake and gradually increased as carbs were re-introduced to the study diet.

Retired baseball stars Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro each have Hall of Fame-worthy numbers, more than 500 home runs.

Want to improve tomato crop yields without using more fertilizer? Try  verimcompost leachate. That is a soil ameliorant, which is basically a fertilizer but made of an organic liquid produced by earthworm poop. If you are really organic, you can even make tea from it. 

A research project recently studied the effects of vermicompost leachate on tomato seedlings subjected to various temperatures and levels of water stress. 

New findings about carbon deep beneath the Earth's surface suggest it might have influenced the history of life on the planet - and diamonds.

There is little understanding of how carbon behaved deep below the Earth's surface so researchers have created a model to try and calculate how much carbon and what types exist in fluids at 100 miles below the Earth's surface at temperatures up to 2,100 degrees F. 

25 years ago, the United Nations laid the foundation for children's rights and protections - at least as part of international theater. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most ratified human rights treaty in history but three members, Somalia, South Sudan and the United States, have not signed it even though the Reagan administration wrote most of the verbiage.

An ancient, deep canyon buried along the Yarlung Tsangpo River in south Tibet, north of the eastern end of the Himalayas, has been discovered by geologists who say this ancient canyon--thousands of feet deep in places--effectively rules out a popular model used to explain how the massive and picturesque gorges of the Himalayas became so steep, so fast. 

Vaccines are medical technology and like all technology some of the production runs are misfires. Some shots fail due to "leakiness," lack of effectiveness on certain individuals in a population, or shorter duration of potency.

A study of 1,300 middle-aged men and 1,500 middle-aged women in Wisconsin found that being the boss increases depression among women but decreases it for men.

"Women with job authority -- the ability to hire, fire, and influence pay -- have significantly more symptoms of depression than women without this power," said  University of Texas at Austin sociologist Tetyana Pudrovska, the lead author of the study "Gender, Job Authority, and Depression," in the December issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. "In contrast, men with job authority have fewer symptoms of depression than men without such power."