The esophagus carries food and liquid from the mouth to the stomach. There are two main types of esophageal cancer: adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. The most common form of the disease in the U.S. is adenocarcinoma and is most prevalent in Caucasian men between the ages of 50 and 70.

Adenocarcinoma, which is one of the fastest growing cancers in the country, has also been linked to obesity – perhaps related to chronic exposure to stomach acid. According to the National Cancer Institute, about 18,000 Americans were diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2013.

A paper by The Environmental Justice and Health Alliance (EJHA), Center for Effective Government (CEG) and Coming Clean, links higher poverty to many Black and Latino communities living within chemical disaster "vulnerability zones" and say the risk of danger is much greater for those communities than for the U.S. as a whole - the very definition of disproportionate danger. 

PULLMAN, Wash.—It sounds like a phrase from Urban Dictionary, or the title of an animated gif, but a Washington State University researcher says "exploding head syndrome" is an authentic and largely overlooked phenomenon that warrants a deeper look.

"It's a provocative and understudied phenomenon," said Brian Sharpless, a WSU assistant professor and director of the university psychology clinic, who recently reviewed the scientific literature on the disorder for the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews. "I've worked with some individuals who have it seven times a night, so it can lead to bad clinical consequences as well."

Most dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago but one dinosaur lineage survived and lives on today – we call these the birds and they rule the skies the way they once ruled land. 

An international team, led by scientists from Oxford University and the Royal Ontario Museum, estimated the body mass of 426 dinosaur species based on the thickness of their leg bones. The team found that dinosaurs showed rapid changes in body size shortly after their origins, around 220 million years ago. 

However, these soon slowed: only the evolutionary line leading to birds continued to change size at this rate, and did so for a further 170 million years, producing new ecological diversity not seen in other dinosaur lineages.

Pregnant women show increased activity in the area of the brain related to emotional skills as they prepare to bond with their babies, according to a new study by scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The research, which will be presented at the British Psychological Society's annual conference on Wednesday 7 May, found that pregnant women use the right side of their brain more than new mothers do when they look at faces with emotive expressions.

Neutron stars are extraordinarily dense stellar bodies created when massive stars collapse. They host the strongest magnetic fields in the universe -- as much as a billion times more powerful than any man-made electromagnet.

But some neutron stars are much more strongly magnetized than others and no one is sure why.

A paper by McGill University physicists Konstantinos Gourgouliatos and Andrew Cumming
in Physical Review Letters  sheds new light on the expected geometry of the magnetic field in neutron stars and could help scientists measure the mass and radius of these unusual stellar bodies, and thereby gain insights into the physics of matter at extreme densities.

There once was a time when pilots had to do everything with a plane - they had to be able to repair it and fly it and that meant knowing everything about it.

Today, much of flying is automated, freeing pilots' attention from mundane flight tasks and allowing them to focus on the big picture. Many regard humans as something of a safety net for machines, there in case something goes wrong - but a paper in Human Factors says it doesn't really work that way. 

Orlando, Fla. — Scientists have developed the first reversible glue that could be used on the battlefield to treat eye injuries, potentially saving soldiers' vision. The research is being presented at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) this week in Orlando, Fla.

When applied to a wounded eye, the adhesive warms up and becomes sticky, sealing the wound and minimizing further damage while the soldier is transported for treatment. Upon arriving at a hospital, doctors can simply apply cool saline solution to the glue, causing it to revert to its non-adhesive form and be removed with minimal discomfort.

If you want to find a hotbed of anti-science sentiment, sure, you could go to a cigar bar full of Republicans and mention that the temperature outside must be up because of global warming - and you would get lots of predictable responses, but you would not get someone claiming you were on the IPCC because they remembered reading your name somewhere this one time.

If you want to see true cluelessness coupled with denial of science, even the Republican National Convention won't do it - you have go to sites about food that are run by anti-science groups.

Astronomers have made a measurement of a distant neutron star that is one million times more precise than the previous world's best - and they did it by using...nothing.

The interstellar medium is the 'empty' space between stars and galaxies. It's not really empty, it is made up of sparsely spread charged particles and those can be used as a giant lens. The astronomers did just that, to magnify and look closely at the radio wave emission from a small rotating neutron star.

Result: the highest resolution measurement ever achieved, equivalent to being able to see the double-helix structure of our genes from the Moon.