The nearby star system Fomalhaut has been discovered to be not just a double star, as astronomers had thought, but a really wide triple star -   a previously known smaller star in its vicinity is also part of the Fomalhaut system. 

There's little quantifiable value to arts and literature but they hold a great deal more prestige in culture than science does. If you attend a Manhattan dinner party and are unfamiliar with some obscure performance artist, they will be horrified - but they won't know anything at all about adaptive radiation. 

A new social psychology paper attempt to change that quantifiability; it says that highbrow literature enhances a set of skills and thought processes fundamental to complex social relationships—and functional societies. Sorry, Fifty Shades of Grey readers, that didn't help you read minds at all.

The biggest threat to vaccine acceptance is not distrust of science, misinformation campaigns or deficit thinking among the public, but rather the failure of government and institutions to use evidence-based strategies, says a new paper.

If you want to enjoy your food, stop taking pictures of it and putting them on the Internet, say marketing scholars.

They mean you, foodies on Instagram and Pinterest. It could be ruining your appetite by making you feel like you've already experienced eating that food.

Marketing experts at Brigham Young and University of Minnesota have concluded that what happens is the over-exposure to food imagery increases people's satiation. Satiation is defined as the drop in enjoyment with repeated consumption. Or, in other words, the fifth bite of cake or the fourth hour of playing a video game are both less enjoyable than the first.

I've often argued that California's biggest industry is hypocrisy - not just talking about freedom and liberalism while banning conduct elites happen not to like this year or reconfiguring voting districts so that there is no political opposition but that we claim to care about the environment.

In reality, our dirty secret, that people either don't know or don't want to know but every policy maker is well aware of, is that garbage has been one of our biggest exports. We tax the public a lot to deal with recycling, and then pay companies a lot to handle recycling, and then those companies ship it to China as garbage.  

Resveratrol, a chemical found in red wine, remains effective at fighting cancer even after the body's metabolism has converted it into other compounds, according to a new paper in Science Translational Medicine.

Resveratrol is metabolized very quickly and it had previously been thought that levels of the extracted chemical drop too quickly to make it usable in clinical trials. The new research shows that the chemical can still be taken into cells after it has been metabolized into resveratrol sulfates. Enzymes within cells are then able to break it down into resveratrol again – meaning that levels of resveratrol in the cells are higher than was previously thought.

It bugs me a little when 'time' is randomly called a dimension in casual talk. Since just after Einstein's relativity, we've been treated to the mathematical idea that time is its own dimension - though Einstein never said that.

Transgendered androphilic males may have been accepted in ancient hunter-gatherer cultures because they were an extra set of hands to support their families, according to a new article in Human Nature.

Nocturnal animals use their noses to stay alive. Mice, among others, depend on their impressive olfactory powers to sniff out food or avoid danger in the dark, using a streamlined system that sends the sensory cue to neural centers in the brain that need only a few synapses to rapidly initiate instinctive fleeing behavior. 

A tuberculosis vaccine developed at McMaster University published phase one clinical study results today.

 Tuberculosis is a serious public health threat. One-third of world's population is infected with the organism that causes tuberculosis. The current vaccine used to prevent it is ineffective and high incidence of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis is also a problem.