US Right to Know of Oakland, California, is using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to suppress and harass scientists and imply they have unethical links to the agricultural biotechnology industry - in short, the group insists scientists are being bought off.

What was wrong when opposition groups did it to climate scientists, according to supporters of anti-science agendas like Union of Concerned Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council, is suddenly just fine when it is being used against every other evidence-based position, but especially when it comes to helping their wealthy donors in the $100 billion Big Organic industry.

The Thing, Human Torch, Invisible Woman and Mister Fantastic are back this summer!

In the new movie reboot, the team gets its powers while in an alternate dimension. At Reactions, though, they stick to comic-book canon. In this week's video, they explain the original way the Fantastic Four got their power - radiation - with help from SciPop Talks.

Researchers at the UW Medicine, Veteran's Administration Puget Sound and Saint Louis University have made a promising discovery that insulin delivered high up in the nasal cavity goes to affected areas of brain with lasting results in improving memory.

The findings were published online July 30 in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

"Before this study, there was very little evidence of how insulin gets into the brain and where it goes," said William Banks, UW professor of internal medicine and geriatrics, VA Puget Sound physician and the principal investigator of the study. "We showed that insulin goes to areas where we hoped it would go."

It is hardly news when partygoers end up in the emergency room from an overdose of methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), aka ecstasy (and a whole bunch of other names, such as Molly, E, X, many others).

Rather than simply report on another recent case at a music festival in California, in which ecstasy may have been the cause of two deaths, we thought it might be more interesting to explain what ecstasy really is, and debunk the myths that surround it.

People associate wasps with memories of picnic invasions, BBQs under siege, and painful stings. There is a lot more to these much-maligned insects though, and with more than 100,000 different species, their life histories range from the quietly unobtrusive to the bizarre and gruesome. A new study in the Journal of Experimental Biology documents one such disturbing example of wasp larvae that takes control of their unfortunate spider hosts.

If you are watching what you eat, working out, and still not seeing improvements in your cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, etc., here's some hope. A new report suggests that inflammation induced by deficiencies in vitamins and minerals might be the culprit.

The researchers show that - in some people - improvement results in many of the major markers of health when nutritional deficiencies are corrected. Some even lost weight without a change in their diet or levels of activity.

Follicular helper Tcells (TFH cells), a rare type of immune cell that is essential for inducing a strong and lasting antibody response to viruses and other microbes, have garnered intense interest in recent years but the molecular signals that drive their differentiation had remained unclear.

Now, a team of researchers at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology has identified a pair of master regulators that control the fate of TFH cells.

In America this year, over 21,000 new cases of ovarian cancer are expected, and over 14,000 deaths.

Once ovarian cancer has spread within the peritoneal cavity or to other organs, long-range survival is rare. However, shorter-term benefits can be obtained via several different chemotherapy regimens and one, essentially abdominal chemotherapy, has been very promising.

So why isn't it used more?

Cancer cells in neuroblastoma contain a molecule that breaks down a key energy source for the body's immune cells, leaving them too physically drained to fight the disease, according to new research.

Scientists have discovered that the cells in neuroblastoma - a rare type of childhood cancer that affects nerve cells - produce a molecule that breaks down arginine, one of the building blocks of proteins and an essential energy source for immune cells. 
Around 90 cases of neuroblastoma are diagnosed each year in the UK, mostly in children under five years old.

In patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), atherosclerosis is exceedingly common and contributes to the development of heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in this group. New research suggests that an organic byproduct generated by intestinal bacteria may be responsible for the formation of cholesterol plaques in the arteries of individuals with decreased kidney function. The findings suggest that targeting this byproduct may be a novel strategy for safeguarding the heart health of patients with CKD.