Osteoporosis, a disease of progressive bone loss, affects 70 percent of the U.S. population older than age 50 - about 50 percent of women and 20 percent of men. These individuals are at risk for fragility fractures, a break that results from a fall, or occurs in the absence of obvious trauma, and most commonly seen in the wrist, the upper arm, the hip, and the spine.  

People who sustain a fragility fracture are at a higher risk for future fractures and face increasing treatment costs. According to a new study, anti-osteoporotic therapy, a treatment intended to increase bone mineral density and slow or stop the loss of bone tissue, can decrease the risk of subsequent fractures by 40 percent.  

A course on critical thinking has generated a new proposal to remove sources of bias in research and improve confidence in published studies.

Social science research got a black eye recently when the authors of several studies were shown to have manipulated data. But the more prevalent issue in the social sciences today is not actual fraud, but subtle and usually inadvertent bias that skews the conclusions of studies and often makes them unrepeatable.

Pioneering new research sheds light on the impact of climate change on subglacial lakes found under the Greenland ice sheet.

A team of experts, led by Dr Steven Palmer from the University of Exeter, has studied the water flow paths from one such subglacial lake, which drained beneath the ice sheet in 2011.

The study shows, for the first time, how water drained from the lake - via a subglacial tunnel. Significantly, the authors present satellite observations that show that a similar event happened in 1995, suggesting that this lake fills and drains periodically.

The study, called Subglacial lake drainage detected beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet is published in the journal Nature Communications.

If there were humans on the Moon - would we see the settlement lights from the Earth? For instance during a thin crescent Moon - could we see the lights of civilization in the parts of the Moon in darkness? 

It's a fun question to answer I think, so let's give it a go.

We can work it out backwards from the brightness of the full Moon.

Looking out on the lunar surface from inside a Moon city, frame from the 1965 Russian film Luna

(You can get this article as a kindle ebook)

Though activists want to retreat into the past and have less energy available for the public (which will impact the poor) a more progressive approach is to look to science and the future - but that will only work if there are stable policies in place.

Oddly, this progressive thinking is coming from energy corporations rather than environmentalists. A group of electricity corporations are creating a picture of a future high-tech energy mix that would help nations meet climate-related CO₂ reduction pledges and the expanding demand for electricity.

Children's self-esteem is linked to the behaviour of who is considered the most powerful parent within the household, new University of Sussex research suggests.

The study of English and Indian families living in Britain is the first to assess the impact on a child's wellbeing of the household power structures that exist within different cultures.

Psychologists interviewed 125 English and Indian families living in West London.

They found that English children whose mothers displayed more negative parenting traits - such as detachment, intrusiveness, lax enforcement of discipline, and controlling behaviour - reported lower self-esteem. But, for Indian children, the father's behaviour had more of an impact.

One of biology's long-standing puzzles is how so many similar species can co-exist in nature. Do they really all fulfill a different role? Massive data on beetles now provide strong evidence for the idea that evolution can drive species into groups of look-a-likes that are functionally similar, according to a study by an international consortium of scientists led by Wageningen University, Netherlands.

Cigarette smoking and heavy alcohol use cause epigenetic changes to DNA that reflect accelerated biological aging in distinct, measurable ways, according to research presented at the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) 2015 Annual Meeting in Baltimore.

The popularity of ziplining has skyrocketed rapidly in recent years. The number of commercial ziplines in the U.S. rose from 10 in 2001 to more than 200 in 2012, in addition to more than 13,000 amateur ziplines which can be found in outdoor education programs, camps, and backyards. The increase in popularity has also increased the number of injuries related to ziplining. A new study by researchers in the Center for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital found that an estimated 16,850 non-fatal zipline-related injuries were treated in U.S. emergency departments from 1997 through 2012.

Although children with high health care needs represent a small percentage of the overall pediatric population, they account for a large percentage of pediatric health care costs, including up to 40% of pediatric hospital charges. In recent years, there has been more information available about the medical care received by these children, but generally studies have been limited to care provided in hospital settings.