Boulder, Colo., USA – Impact craters reveal one of the most spectacular geologic process known to man. During the past 3.5 billion years, it is estimated that more than 80 bodies, larger than the dinosaur-killing asteroid that struck the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, have bombarded Earth. However, tectonic processes, weathering, and burial quickly obscure or destroy craters. For example, if Earth weren't so dynamic, its surface would be heavily cratered like the Moon or Mercury.

Using your brain – particularly during adolescence – may help brain cells survive and could impact how it functions after puberty.

According to a recently published study in Frontiers in Neuroscience, Rutgers University behavioral neuroscientist Tracey Shors, who co-authored the study, found that the newborn brain cells in young rats that were successful at learning survived while the same brain cells in animals that didn't master the task died quickly.

Lighter-colored butterflies and dragonflies do better in warmer areas of Europe, a finding that could have implicated for global warming; darker insects could face a competitive disadvantage, finds a study recently published in Nature Communications.

Light-colored insects dominate the warmer south of Europe and darker insects dominate the cooler north. For dragonflies, the insect assemblage in Europe has on average gotten lighter during the last decades, which the authors attribute to climate change.

Defensive medicine, to prevent malpractice claims, are far higher costs than medical personnel, but the United States shift to government health care is going to add a third component. Tests will be free and people will demand them.

Dr. Alai Tan, a senior biostatistician in the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston   Sealy Center on Aging and lead author of a new study has concluded that providing better access to health care may lead to the overuse of mammograms for women who regularly see a primary care physician and who have a limited life expectancy.

Screening women in this category could subject them "to greater risks of physical, emotional and economic suffering" but it could happen anyway.  

First Lady Michelle Obama may mean well, but overturning school lunch policy based on the beliefs of someone who was paid $300,000 per year to do community outreach for a university wasn't really helping the poor children for whom a school lunch may be their most meaningful meal of the day.

Mandating fruit, which is what the USDA required in 2012, is fine, except a lot of it goes in the garbage. Most decisions are based on fads and gimmicks rather than real data.

Vermont's Charlotte Central school cafeteria has basically a restaurant menu, with locally sourced ingredients, including herbs and vegetables from the playground garden. There's just one problem; the higher cost is obvious but does it work?

A study published today in EMBO Molecular Medicine reveals that the loss of function of the gene RARRES3 in breast cancer cells promotes metastasis to the lung.

The research, headed by Roger Gomis, ICREA Professor at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), is the result of a collaboration between two IRB labs and Joan Massagué, at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

The scientists demonstrate that RARRES3 is suppressed in estrogen receptor-negative (ER-) breast cancer tumours, thus stimulating the later invasion of the cancer cells and conferring them "a greater malignant capacity," says Gomis, head of the Growth control and cancer metastasis lab at the IRB.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) receives comprehensive clinical study data from drug manufacturers and that data form the basis for the decision on the approval of new drugs. 

In 2013, EMA issued a draft policy to make
clinical study data
available to researchers and decision-makers, with extensive data transparency, a move which Science 2.0 applauded. But the latest policy clarification is a puzzle, because it accomplishes almost nothing of any value to the broad community. 

Only reading allowed

WASHINGTON D.C., May 27, 2014 -- It took every inch of the Large Hadron Collider's 17-mile length to accelerate particles to energies high enough to discover the Higgs boson. Now, imagine an accelerator that could do the same thing in, say, the length of a football field. Or less.

That is the promise of laser-plasma accelerators, which use lasers instead of high-power radio-frequency waves to energize electrons in very short distances. Scientists have grappled with building these devices for two decades, and a new theoretical study predicts that this may be easier than previously thought.

New Johns Hopkins research suggests that critically ill patients receiving steroids in a hospital's intensive care unit (ICU) are significantly more likely to develop delirium. Results of their research, they say, suggest minimizing the use of steroids could reduce delirium in the ICU.

While it usually goes away after a few days, studies show delirium in the ICU has a long-term impact. It has been associated with worse functional recovery and cognitive impairments of a magnitude consistent with moderate traumatic brain injury or mild Alzheimer's disease.

Overall, up to 80 percent of ventilated patients develop delirium in the ICU, and researchers have been looking for risk factors.

Heat shock protein (HSP90) has been suggested to be involved in neuronal protein misfolding and accumulation in Parkinson's disease (PD) brains leading to dopaminergic neuronal death and the eventual dopamine depletion. Therefore, HSP90 has been suggested as a therapeutic target in PD. Dr. Muhammed Al-Jarrah and co-workers from Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) point out exercise training significantly inhibited HSP90 overexpression in the soleus and gastrocnemius in PDe rats, which is a potential therapeutic target for ameliorating skeletal muscle abnormalities in PD. The relevant article has been published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 6, 2014).