For students, the start of the school year means new classes, new friends, homework and sports. It also brings the threat of head lice. The itch-inducing pests lead to missed school days and frustrated parents, who could have even more reason to be wary of the bug this year. Scientists report that lice populations in at least 25 states have developed resistance to over-the-counter treatments still widely recommended by doctors and schools.

The researchers are presenting their work today at the 250th National Meeting&Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society. The meeting features more than 9,000 presentations on a wide range of science topics and is being held here through Thursday.

My wife and I went to see Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (“You and Me and the Bottle Makes Three”) Saturday at Conner Prairie, part of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra Symphony on the Prairie summer series. We got there a bit early and ended up sweating in the hot, hot sun waiting for the concert to start.

It used to be that clean energy was something that environmental lobbyists pretended to care about, at least when it came to raising money.  Greenpeace, NRDC, you name it, they all put clean energy in their tool chest of ways to get their hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank.

Of course, they never actually built anything to help us get clean energy, just like they don't do any science and instead prefer to criticize those who know what they're talking about. They just embrace whatever isn't shown to be viable and abandon efforts that succeed, as they did with ethanol and natural gas after they got the uptake they insisted was needed.
 

A team of researchers has discovered a Jupiter-like planet within a young system that could provide a new understanding of how planets formed around our sun.

The new planet, called 51 Eridani b, is the first exoplanet discovered by the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), a new instrument operated by an international collaboration headed by Bruce Macintosh, a professor of physics in the Kavli Institute at Stanford University. It is a million times fainter than its star and shows the strongest methane signature ever detected on an alien planet, which should yield additional clues as to how the planet formed.

Dosing obese teens with vitamin D shows no benefits for their heart health or diabetes risk, and could have the unintended consequences of increasing cholesterol and fat-storing triglycerides. These are the latest findings in a series of Mayo Clinic studies in childhood obesity.

Seema Kumar, M.D., a pediatric endocrinologist in the Mayo Clinic Children's Center, has been studying the effects of vitamin D supplementation in children for 10 years, through four clinical trials and six published studies. To date, Dr. Kumar's team has found limited benefit from vitamin D supplements in adolescents. The latest study, Effect of Vitamin D3 Treatment on Endothelial Function in Obese Adolescents, appears online in Pediatric Obesity.

Twenty years have passed since the first observation of the top quark, the last of the collection of six that constitutes the matter of which atomic nuclei are made. And in these twenty years particle physics has made some quite serious leaps forward; the discovery that neutrinos oscillate and have mass (albeit a tiny one), and the discovery of the Higgs boson are the two most important ones to cite. Yet the top quark remains a very interesting object to study at particle colliders.

  So called "memristors" are an intriguing hot topic in electronics and nanotechnology, and highly controversial to boot. A certain type of memristor device was predicted to exist in 1971. Being perhaps a simple electrical component much like a resistor or capacitor, HP claimed to have discovered the missing memristor in 2008, except, "The Missing Memristor has Not been Found" [Nature Publishing Group’s Scientific Reports 5, 11657 (1215)]

Sepsis kills more Americans every year than AIDS, breast cancer and prostate cancer combined but it gets far less attention. Unlike those other diseases, hours can make the difference between life and death in sepsis.

The results of a recent study show that children who report eating more polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), found in tree nuts, seeds and fatty fish, and consume a higher ratio of PUFA: saturated fatty acids (SFAs), have more lean body mass, lower percent body fat, and less intra-abdominal fat (belly fat).

The study was published in "The Journal of Nutrition" and conducted by researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Health and Wellness Center and the University of Colorado School of Medicine at the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Colo. in collaboration with the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Male and female brains operate differently at a molecular level, according to a new study of a brain region involved in learning and memory and responses to stress and epilepsy.

Many brain disorders vary between the sexes, but how biology and culture contribute to these differences has been unclear. The neuroscientists found an intrinsic biological difference between males and females in the molecular regulation of synapses in the hippocampus. This provides a scientific reason to believe that female and male brains may respond differently to drugs targeting certain synaptic pathways.