An editorial in the Wall Street Journal summarizes the European Union’s decades-long flight from science, common sense and consistency. These un- or even anti-science positions are driven by many idées fixes, baseless myths and superstitions, promulgated by “consumer groups” and by deep green “environmentalists,” who claim to be concerned about Mother Earth. 

It's time to stop counting calories and start promoting the nutritional value of foods, according to an editorial in Open Heart. 

Drs Aseem Malhotra and James DiNicolantonio, and Professor Simon Capewell, argue that rather like stopping smoking, simple dietary changes can rapidly improve health outcomes at the population level.  They believe this will more rapidly cut illness and death from cardiovascular disease and curb the rising tide of obesity. For example, boosting omega 3 fatty acid (from fatty fish), olive oil, and nut intake have all been associated with reductions in deaths from all causes and from cardiovascular disease, within months, they say.

In its first clinical trial, an antibody therapy produced at least partial remissions in a third of patients with multiple myeloma who had exhausted multiple prior treatments, investigators at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and other organizations have reported.

The drug, daratumumab, proved generally safe in patients, even at the highest doses tested in the study. The results of the trial - a combined phase 1 and 2 study - strongly support testing of the drug in a larger group of patients in both phase 2 and 3 trials, the authors say.

Following one of the largest-scale scientific reproducibility investigations to date, a group of psychology researchers has reported results from an effort to replicate 100 recently published psychology studies; though they were able to successfully repeat the original experiments in most all cases, they were able to reproduce the original results in less than half, they report.

Male teens who experiment with cannabis before age 16, and have a high genetic risk for schizophrenia, show a different brain development trajectory than low risk peers who use cannabis.

The discovery, made from a combined analysis of over 1,500 youth, contributes to a growing body of evidence implicating cannabis use in adolescence and schizophrenia later in life. 

"If I offered you a bruised banana, you probably wouldn't be interested," said Jonathan Deutsch, PhD, director of Drexel University's Center for Hospitality and Sport Management. "But what if I offered you some banana ice cream on a hot summer day? I bet you'd find that a lot more appealing."

It was this simple observation that inspired a new model for recovering would-be wasted - or surplus - food and repurposing it to feed hungry people, generate revenue and even create jobs. The model was recently piloted in West Philadelphia, home to a large population of low-income and food insecure individuals, as part of the Environmental Protection Agency's Food Recovery Challenge with support from Brown's Super Stores.

This is just for fun. At first sight this seems impossible - the smallest stars are heavier than the heaviest planets, and how can something heavier orbit something that is lighter? But what if you have a very dense star and very large very low density planet? And if you interpret "orbiting it" as "having barycenter (the "center of mass of the system") within the planet"?

Also, could a star sometimes be lighter than a planet, is that possible at all? I'll also describe a way that a heavier object can, in a way, "orbit" a lighter one - a way to get a heavier star move in such a way that the barycenter of the system lies within a large low density planet - can you figure out how, before I get to it?

Thanks to decades of action against tobacco, smoking rates among children and young people are in decline: far fewer teenagers are now taking up smoking than in the past.

A new study clearly establishes a partial genetic basis underlying racial differences in slow-wave sleep, suggesting that it may be possible to develop sleep-related therapies that target specific genetic variants.

Using a panel of 1,698 ancestry informative genetic markers, the study found that greater African genetic ancestry was associated with lower amounts of slow-wave sleep in African-American adults. African ancestry explained 11 percent of the variation in slow-wave sleep after adjustment for potential confounders. Although a similar association was observed for delta power, no association with African ancestry was observed for sleep duration and efficiency.

Images of the systematic destruction of archaeological sites and art pieces in Syria are no news any more, but I was especially saddened to see before/after aerial pictures of Palmyra's site today, which demonstrate how the beautiful temple of Bel has been completely destroyed by explosives. A picture of the temple is shown below.