Contrary to sociological claims that poor people are more likely to be criminals, increasing the minimum wage will not lower violent crime or property crime, according to research presented today at the American Society of Criminology’s 69th annual meeting in Atlanta. 

The scholars studied official U.S. crime data and economic data from 1977 to 2012 to compare violent crime and property crime rates among states that abided only by the federal minimum wage standards, and the 18 states that had raised their minimum wage requirement at one time or another above the federal mandate.

Health care costs are going to continue to go up and a new paper says that physicians control more than 80 percent of those costs.

That part is true, though doctors are often forced to practice such "defensive medicine" for legal reasons. 

Neutrinos can pass right through your body, the walls of your house, entire planets, even emerging from near the surface of fascinating and frightening black holes. 

And now, an international scientific collaboration  using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory telescope built over a mile deep in the Antarctic ice has taken an 'astronomical' step forward in unmasking the origins of some of these high-energy particles, the so-called "messengers of the universe."

The researchers have observed 28 very high-energy particle events and they constitute the first solid evidence of neutrinos coming from "cosmic accelerators"—potentially such sources as exploding stars or accreting black holes. 

Drinking and marriage don't mix - unless both spouses do, according to a recent paper by the University at Buffalo Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) which followed 634 couples from the time of their weddings through the first nine years of marriage.

The results: couples where only one spouse was a heavy drinker had a much higher divorce rate than other couples but if both spouses were heavy drinkers, the divorce rate was the same as for couples where neither were heavy drinkers. 

Through millions of years of evolution, the shape of an egg has evolved to an optimum – at least from a hen’s point of view.
For some humans though, this shape is less than ideal –  there are those who prefer instead the aesthetic appeal of a cuboid rather than ovoid.

For technical (and ethical) reasons, this shape modification must necessarily be performed after laying rather than before. Prompting inventor Masashi Nakagawa to devise his
‘Apparatus for deforming boiled egg’  – for which he received a US patent (4,092,093) in May 1978.

In drug design, the protein K-Ras has been on everyone's target list for more than 30 years due to its status as the most commonly mutated oncogene in human cancers.

Despite its high profile, K-Ras has been "undruggable" - many pharmaceutical, biotech, and academic laboratories have failed to design a drug that successfully targets the mutant gene.

Older men with moderate testosterone,
a key male sex hormone involved in maintaining sex drive, sperm production and bone health
, tend to live longer, according to a new paper.

Physicians have long known that low testosterone levels can signal health problems, but the new study found men may not fare better when levels of the hormone rise too high. 

The population-based cohort study analyzed the mortality rate in a group of 3,690 community-dwelling men between the ages of 70 to 89 in Perth, Western Australia. Participants' testosterone and DHT levels were measured between 2001 and 2004. Researchers analyzed the group's survival rate as of December 2010.

When Neil Armstrong took his first step for all mankind in 1969, researchers obviously had no idea how much of a nuisance the lunar soil beneath his feet would be. The scratchy dust clung to everything it touched, causing scientific instruments to overheat and, for Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, a sort of lunar dust hay fever. The annoying particles even prompted a scientific experiment to figure out how fast they collect, but the data got lost.

Maybe you like to eat carp. Invasive Asian carp have been successfully harvested and served on a dinner plate but the idea of similarly harvesting invasive plants and converting them into ethanol isn't realistic yet - even less realistic than currently mandated and subsidized ethanol. 

Obviously, harvesting invasive plants for use as biofuels is a great idea and merits basic research but from a policy point of view, let's hope the government does not start throwing money at companies. For now, it faces poses numerous obstacles and is too expensive to consider, at least with the current ethanol pathways.

The deadly amphibian disease chytridiomycosis has caused the extinction of Darwin's frogs, according to scientists from the Zoological Society of Londonand Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile. 

Conservation scientists found evidence of amphibian chytridiomycosis causing mortality in  the the northern Rhinoderma rufum endemic to Chile, and linked this with both the population decline of  the southern Rhinoderma darwinii from Chile and Argentina, including from undisturbed ecosystems.