A paper in Frontiers in Psychology says that 70 percent of faculty are non-tenure-track academics and they experience stress, anxiety, and depression due to their insecure job situation - in other words, they are stressed out about the exact same job situation everyone without a job for life that everyone in the world faces.

Adjunct titles, lecturers and instructors work under short-term contracts and have limited or no health and retirement benefits. Sometimes they are part-time and at different institutes simultaneously. 

If you've ever been on the freeway and saw the guy next to you holding his coffee with one hand, texting with the other, and steering with his kneecap while doing 80, you might find it quite plausible that humans only use 10% of their brain.

This is actually a scientific urban legend, though, and quite far from the truth. The man you see is engaging many parts of his brain - the driving uses the cerebellum, the texting uses his frontal lobe, reading his texts uses his visual cortex. He finally heard you honking after his kneecap steered into your lane. That's the temporal lobe. Although this man may not be using his brain very well, he is still using it.

Frogs, dogs, whales, snails can all do it, but humans and primates can't. Regrow nerves after an injury, that is — while many animals have this ability, humans don't. But new research from the Salk Institute suggests that a small molecule may be able to convince damaged nerves to grow and effectively rewire circuits. Such a feat could eventually lead to therapies for the thousands of Americans with severe spinal cord injuries and paralysis.

"This research implies that we might be able to mimic neuronal repair processes that occur naturally in lower animals, which would be very exciting," says the study's senior author and Salk professor Kuo-Fen Lee. The results were published in PLOS Biology.

Psychologists say they have developed and validated a new method to identify which people are narcissistic: just ask them.

In a series of 11 experiments involving more than 2,200 people of all ages, the researchers found they could reliably identify narcissistic people by asking them this exact question (including the note):

To what extent do you agree with this statement: "I am a narcissist." (Note: The word "narcissist" means egotistical, self-focused, and vain.)

Participants rated themselves on a scale of 1 (not very true of me) to 7 (very true of me).

How narcissistic are you? Take the test.

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite known as TRMM flew directly over the eye of powerful Hurricane Iselle and found extremely heavy rainfall rates occurring there.

Warming temperatures are causing Arctic lakes to release methane, a greenhouse gas that has 23X the short term warming effect of CO2, it has been said. A new paper in Nature found that Siberian lakes have actually pulled more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than they have released into it since the last Ice Age

That is causing an overall slight cooling effect. Permafrost, especially that in the Siberian Arctic, contains significant amounts of all organic carbon found on Earth locked away in frozen soils. Warming global temperatures in the 15,000 years since the last Ice Age have begun to thaw the permafrost, leading to the widespread formation of lakes. 

Electronic cigarettes are booming in popularity, thanks to campaigns to reduce smoking and the goodwill of nicotine patches. There's no evidence foe health risks but evidence that they help people quit smoking is also limited, according to a research review in the July/August Journal of Addiction Medicine, the official journal of the American Society of Addiction Medicine.

A new study investigated the value of the Pre-Exhaustion (PreEx) training method and found that that the various arrangements of different exercise protocols is of less relevance than simply performing resistance training exercises with a high intensity of effort within any protocol. 

Dental researchers writing in the Journal of Dentistry are warning parents of the dangers of soft drinks, fruit juice and sports drinks high in acidity- they call those a "triple-threat" of permanent damage to young people's teeth.

In the article, they demonstrate that lifelong damage is caused by acidity to the teeth within the first 30 seconds of acid attack. They also say drinks high in acidity combined with night-time tooth grinding and reflux can cause major, irreversible damage to young people's teeth.

I thought I'd post this because there are many who haven't followed the latest findings, who still think that present day life on the surface of Mars is absolutely impossible because of UV light, ionizing radiation, and perchlorates, and because the atmosphere is in almost perfect chemical equilibrium. 

That is indeed what most scientists believed, prior to about 2008. But it is now generally agreed in the field that if there do turn out to be nutritious warm and wet habitats on the surface of Mars, they will be habitable.