A Johns Hopkins University of research suggests that about 30 minutes of meditation daily may improve symptoms of anxiety and depression, without medication.

The scholars evaluated the degree to which self-reported symptoms changed in people who had a variety of conditions, such as insomnia or fibromyalgia. A minority had been diagnosed with a mental illness.

They were studying so-called "mindfulness meditation", a form of Buddhist self-awareness designed to focus precise attention on the moment at hand, and say it shows promise in alleviating some pain symptoms as well as stress. The researchers controlled for the possibility of the placebo effect but it should be noted that reviews of self-reported claims makes statistical reliability difficult.

No one wants to work for free; doctors have to pay for insurance and employees and their medical school loans, drug companies spend billions on each drug and 95 percent of the time the drugs will never make it to market.

And that chain of money flows to cancer patients as well. Cutting-edge pharmaceuticals are expensive and for poorer people, unless they get a cost waiver from the company, even the co-payment for insurance may be too much.

It's no surprise that when the patient's share of prescription costs becomes too high, many patients skip doses or stop taking medication entirely, according to research conducted at the University of North Carolina.

Residents of a small village on the Fijian island of Yasawa
went boating alone, without life vests, and gave no thought to shimmying up very tall coconut trees.  

Inhibitors of both JAK and Src kinases represent promising targets for cancer therapeutics because of the central importance of these kinases in tumor cell proliferation and survival. In addition, in cancer cells activation of JAK has been reported as a compensatory effect in response to Src inhibitor exposure. This implies simultaneous inhibition of both kinases could have a synergy of anti-cancer effects compared to an agent that inhibits one or the other kinases.
 

A newly discovered system of two white dwarf stars and a superdense pulsar, all packed into a space smaller than the Earth's orbit around the sun, could allow astronomers to tackle the very nature of gravity itself.

The pulsar is 4,200 light-years from Earth and is spinning nearly 366 times per second – it was found to be in close orbit with a white dwarf star and the pair is in orbit with another, more distant white dwarf. 

The three-body system is scientists' best opportunity yet to discover a violation of a key concept in Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity: the strong equivalence principle, which states that the effect of gravity on a body does not depend on the nature or internal structure of that body.

The cockroach in the genus Ectobius is an invasive organism and the most common cockroach inhabiting a large region from northernmost Europe to southernmost Africa. 

Astronomers has discovered the first Earth-mass planet that transits its host star and found that KOI-314c is the lightest planet to have both its mass and physical size measured.

Though it weighs the same as Earth, it is 60 percent larger in diameter, meaning that it must have a very thick, gaseous atmosphere, they note.

The team gleaned the planet's characteristics using data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft. KOI-314c orbits a dim, red dwarf star located approximately 200 light-years away. It circles its star every 23 days. The team estimates its temperature to be 220 degrees Fahrenheit, too hot for life as we know it.

There's no greater feel-good fallacy than the belief that organic food is somehow superior to conventionally farmed food. In reality, organic food isn't more environmentally responsible, it is worse, it isn't better for your health, it is worse and, for the most part, it isn't even grown by small farmers, it is giant conglomerates who, like with gluten-free, fat-free or any other food fad, encourage proponents and the mythology of health benefits because they can charge more money.

Is there such a thing as moral expertise?

Good question, right? I’ve been thinking more about it for a few weeks now as a result of an interesting talk by Gopal Sreenivasan (Duke University) entitled “Moral expertise and the proto-authority of affect,” which he gave at CUNY’s Graduate Center.

What does science discover when 70 dogs are allowed to relieve themselves in the open country without being on a leash?

That they have something in common; dogs prefer to do their business while in a body-alignment along the magnetic north-south axis - but only during periods of calm magnetic field conditions.

At least they found something. Prior to the discovery, they had to have been frustrated that, in contrast to grazing cows, hunting foxes and landing waterfowl, dogs showed no clear preference for a particular body alignment while doing number one or number two.