Sardines have been a hot news topic in recent weeks. Environmental groups and others have claimed that the sardine population is collapsing like it did in the mid-1940s. 

The environmental group Oceana has been arguing this point loudly in order to shut down the sardine fishery. That’s why they filed suit in federal court, which is now under appeal, challenging the current sardine management.

A number of people are concerned about BPA in plastics but that is far less warranted than concern about plastics themselves. 

In 1967's "The Graduate", the following conversation took place between an older man and the young protagonist:

McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. 
Benjamin: Yes, sir. 
McGuire: Are you listening? 
Benjamin: Yes, I am. 
McGuire: Plastics.

Lower incomes are associated with higher obesity, though lower income in America is very much a relative term. Poor and minority kids lead the country in bedroom television ownership, so being poor in the US is not the same as in other countries.

With over one-third of American children overweight, the search is on to figure out why. Happy Meals get blamed, as do sodas, trans fats and just about everything else.

A new study even blames television - not necessarily how much time is spent watching it, but having it in the bedroom. The paper in JAMA associated a bedroom television with weight gain in children and adolescents, and say it is unrelated to the time they spend watching.

Maybe photosynthesis can be improved.

That may sound like blasphemy but the easy solution to growing more food is teaching crop plants to concentrate carbon dioxide in their leaves. That could increase photosynthetic efficiency by 60 percent and yields by as much as 40 percent, according to a new study.

We all know the story of Albert Einstein’s “cosmological constant,” or lambda, which he invented, then retracted in shame ("Then away with the cosmological constant!"), and then in 1998, with the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe, it came back with a vengeance as the mathematical representation of 'dark matter'.&n

Two analyses examined issues of sexual orientation and intimate partner violence, including its impact on substance abuse and physical and mental health.

There are many enduring mysteries regarding the composition of the Earth's atmosphere but one may be a little closer to being solved. Researchers have discovered a microbial soil process that helps ensure that the explosive gas hydrogen remains at trace levels. 

In recent decades it was found that about 80 percent of all hydrogen released into the air is rapidly removed through soil activity, but exactly what is recycling it, and how, has remained unclear.

By now, almost everyone understands computers and that current technologies for writing, storing, and reading information are either charge-based or spin-based.

Spin-based devices operate on the principle that in materials like iron, electron spins generate magnetism and the position of the north and south pole of the magnet can be used to store the zeros and ones. This technology is behind both magnetic stripe cards and terabyte computer hard disks. Since these devices are based on spin, they are more robust against charge perturbations but the drawback is that in order to reverse the north and south poles of the magnet, i.e., flip the zero to one or vice versa, the magnetic bit has to be coupled to an electro-magnet or to another permanent magnet.

Here's an intellectual puzzle; which is more real, the viability of wind power as anything more than a sustainable gimmick or Wind Turbine Syndrome?