A survey published in Archives of Pediatrics&Adolescent Medicine
 finds that 14.2 percent of teenage children with any mental disorder have been treated with a psychotropic medication in the last 12 months, which researchers suggest challenges concerns about widespread overmedication and misuse of psychotropic medications among young people in the U.S.

Concern has been raised about inappropriate prescribing of psychotropic medications to children and adolescents, but those criticisms were based on anecdotal reports, studies of small unrepresentative clinical samples and secondary analyses of large databases on prescription drug use that lacked clinical information, the authors write in the study background.

Tornado-like vortexes can be produced in bizarre fluids which are controlled by quantum mechanics, completely unlike normal liquids.

There massed ranks of quantum twisters even  line up in rows on a semiconductor chip. By controlling where electrons move and how they interact with light the team created a marriage of electrons and photons that form a new quantum particle called a 'polariton'.

The results come from a collaboration between the experimental team in the NanoPhotonics Centre at Cambridge, led by Professor Jeremy Baumberg, and the theoretical quantum fluids group of Natalia Berloff.

A new analysis of topographic and gravity data from Titan, the largest moon orbiting Saturn,  indicates its icy outer crust is twice as thick as has generally been thought.

Is there a vast ocean of liquid water lies under the crust?. The new study suggests that the internally generated heat that keeps that ocean from freezing solid depends far more on Titan's interactions with Saturn and its other moons than had been suspected.

Rain in Southern Arizona is usually scarce - but on November 29th, 25 miles north of Tucson, the soil was soaked. Spouting from a network of pipes, thousands of gallons of water drizzled down onto the world's only and largest man-made experimental watershed, recently completed at the University of Arizona's Biosphere 2.  You can read articles from original Biosphere 2 scientist Jane Poynter here.

Women suffering from sleep apnea have a higher degree of brain damage than men with the disorder, according to a study conducted by researchers at the UCLA School of Nursing.  

Obstructive sleep apnea is a serious disorder that occurs when a person's breathing is repeatedly interrupted during sleep, sometimes hundreds of times. Each time, the oxygen level in the blood drops, eventually resulting in damage to many cells in the body. If left untreated, it can lead to high blood pressure, stroke, heart failure, diabetes, depression and other serious health problems. 10 years ago, this UCLA research team showed that men with obstructive sleep apnea have damage to their brain cells.  

Drinking three to four cups of delicious coffee each day may help prevent type 2 diabetes, according to research published by the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC). Really, that is an actual organization dedicated to promoting the health benefits of coffee.  Some skepticism might ordinarily be warranted but since this is about coffee, it is okay to just accept the science.

Apple's Siri sounds like she cares about your needs, but she is faking it.  But some research by a team of engineers shown at the IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology describes a new computer program that gauges human feelings through speech with substantially greater accuracy than existing approaches. 

Some day you may have a smart phone that identifies your mood.

Arthrobotrys oligospora doesn't live a charmed life; it survives on a diet of roundworm, which isn't all that appealing, but the discovery of a team led by Mingjun Zhang, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, could give the fungus's life more purpose—as a cancer fighter. 

They discovered that nanoparticles produced by A. oligospora hold promise for stimulating the immune system and killing tumors.