Should the government tell you what mayonnaise to buy?

Liberals and conservatives would probably agree that freedom is paramount when it comes to sandwich spreads, this is America, after all, but everyone across the ideological spectrum would also agree that some common definition of terms would be called for if someone brought a “cake” and it turned out to be a “vegetable loaf.”

Electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego demonstrated a new wireless communication technique that works by sending magnetic signals through the human body. The new technology could offer a lower power and more secure way to communicate information between wearable electronic devices, providing an improved alternative to existing wireless communication systems, researchers said. They presented their findings Aug. 26 at the 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in Milan, Italy.

Scientists at Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden have discovered a new explanation for severe early infant epilepsy. Mutations in the gene encoding the protein KCC2 can cause the disease, hereby confirming an earlier theory. The findings are being published in the journal Nature Communications.

Research into 430,000-year-old fossils collected in northern Spain found that the evolution of the human body's size and shape has gone through four main stages, according to a recent paper. 

A large international research team including Binghamton University anthropologist Rolf Quam studied the body size and shape in the human fossil collection from the site of the Sima de los Huesos in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain.

Dated to around 430,000 years ago, this site preserves the largest collection of human fossils found to date anywhere in the world. The researchers found that the Atapuerca individuals were relatively tall, with wide, muscular bodies and less brain mass relative to body mass compared to Neanderthals.

Depressive symptoms and extremes of blood pressure predict the highest rates of harmful vascular events in patients with existing heart disease, diabetes or stroke, according to research presented at ESC Congress by Dr Bhautesh Jani, clinical academic fellow in the Institute of Health and Wellbeing, University of Glasgow. 

The study in more than 35 000 patients found that the risk of further stroke or heart attack, heart failure or dying due to heart disease at four years was 83% higher in depressed patients with high blood pressure and 36% higher in depressed patients with low blood pressure, compared to those with normal blood pressure and no depressive symptoms.

Evidence from the tropical lowlands of Central America reveals how Maya activity more than 2,000 years ago not only contributed to the decline of their environment but continues to influence today's environmental conditions, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.

Synthesizing old and new data, researchers were the first to show the full extent of the "Mayacene" as a microcosm of the early anthropocene -- a period when human activity began greatly affecting environmental conditions.

Girls with autism display less repetitive and restricted behavior than boys do, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The study also found that brain differences between boys and girls with autism help explain this discrepancy.

The study, which will be published online Sept. 3 in Molecular Autism, gives the best evidence to date that boys and girls exhibit the developmental disorder differently.

Using an inexpensive drug for every hip or knee replacement since 2013 has helped St. Michael's Hospital reduce its number of red blood cell transfusions performed during these surgeries by more than 40 per cent without negatively affecting patients, according to new research.

The drug tranexamic acid, known as TXA, prevents excessive blood loss during surgeries.

TXA had been shown to be effective in orthopedic, trauma and cardiac patients but less than half of eligible patients at St. Michael's received this drug because of a previous province-wide shortage. The drug was given only to patients at high risk of requiring a blood transfusion.

A few years ago, I couldn’t read an energy bill beyond the charge levied. I couldn’t tell you how energy was measured, or ultimately how its use related to making my life better or worse, let alone how it affected broader society and the planet.

I resolved to change this. I studied energy and sustainability at university, and have gone on to teach there. Throughout this time my wife and I have made many changes to how we use energy at home. Yet when we decided to take a closer look into our electricity bill, we were surprised by what we found.

I was at the ICNFP 2015 Conference, spending two nights to prepare updated versions of two posters following an idea that I had on August 22 just before taking the plane for Crete (the possible space-time contradiction between the preonic vacuum and the macroscopic world, leading to Quantum Mechanics for standard matter), when an important result was posted to arXiv.org .