INDIANAPOLIS - If you really want a drink right now, the source of your craving may be a pea-sized structure deep inside the right side of your brain, according to scientists at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

Using two different kinds of advanced brain imaging techniques (PET and fMRI), the researchers compared the results of giving beer drinkers a taste of their favorite beer versus a sports drink. After tasting the beer the participants reported increased desire to drink beer, whereas the sports drink did not provoke as much desire for beer. The brain scans also showed that the beer flavor induced more activity in both frontal lobes and in the right ventral striatum of the subjects' brains than did the sports drink.

From natural ecosystems to farmers' fields, plants face a dilemma of energy use: outgrow and outcompete their neighbors for light, or defend themselves against insects and disease.

But what if you could grow a plant that does both at the same time?

A team of researchers at Michigan State University is the first to accomplish that feat, and the breakthrough could have fruitful implications for farmers trying to increase crop yields and feed the planet's growing population.

The first study to investigate how dog brains process speech shows that our best friends in the animal kingdom care about both what we say and how we say it. Dogs, like people, use the left hemisphere to process words, a right hemisphere brain region to process intonation, and praising activates dog's reward center only when both words and intonation match, according to a study in Science.

It is now possible for machines to learn how natural or artificial systems work by simply observing them, without being told what to look for, according to researchers at the University of Sheffield.

This could mean advances in the world of technology with machines able to predict, among other things, human behaviour.

The discovery takes inspiration from the work of pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, who proposed a test, which a machine could pass if it behaved indistinguishably from a human. In this test, an interrogator exchanges messages with two players in a different room: one human, the other a machine.

Do anti-vaccine people hang around with anti-vaccine people or did hanging around with them cause them to lose faith in science?

There are an alarming number of factors that all correlate with anti-vaccine sentiment; the types of food purchased, beliefs about science, beliefs about energy, and beliefs about politics. But did all of those happen, and the people who embraced them gravitated toward each other, or did the social circle create the issue?

Irvine, Calif., Aug. 29, 2016 - As a multiyear drought grinds on in the Southwestern United States, many wonder about the impact of global climate change on more frequent and longer dry spells. As humans emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, how will water supply for people, farms, and forests be affected?

A new study from the University of California, Irvine and the University of Washington shows that water conserved by plants under high CO2 conditions compensates for much of the effect of warmer temperatures, retaining more water on land than predicted in commonly used drought assessments.

DALLAS, Aug. 29, 2016 -- Food fortified with folic acid, a B vitamin required in human diets for numerous biological functions, was associated with reduced rates of congenital heart defects, according to new research in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation.

"Our study examined the effect of folic acid food fortification on each specific subtype of congenital heart disease based on the Canadian experience before and after food fortification was made mandatory in 1998," said K.S. Joseph, M.D., Ph.D., the study's senior author and professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

The number of cardiovascular drugs in the research pipeline has declined across all phases of development in the last 20 years even as cardiovascular disease has become the number one cause of death world-wide, according to research published today in JACC: Basic to Translational Science.

While the development and use of new prescription drugs have been associated with significant reduction in cardiovascular mortality over the past two decades, cardiovascular disease is still the leading cause of death in the developing world and accounts for 1 in 3 deaths in the United States. There has been growing concern over the decline in the development of new therapies.

This is the reply after asking a scientist to endorse putting a draft of an article into a more fitting category on the arXiv, which is a mere preprint archive (not a journal or anything like that) where I already put almost 20 articles, and the endorsement would be anonymous, so this established scientist fears that the enforcers at the PC arXiv may notify his or her University - this is the state of free speech today, the reality of the scientific community:

Hi Sascha,

NEW YORK, NY (August 29, 2016)-- New findings suggest that most Americans with depression receive no treatment, while raising the possibility that overtreatment of depression is also widespread. Less than a third of American adults who screened positive for depression received treatment for their symptoms, whereas over two-thirds of adults receiving treatment for depression did not report symptoms of depression or serious psychological distress, according to a study from Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and the University of Pennsylvania.

The study also found that among those who are treated for depression, less than half of those with severe psychological distress are seen by a mental health specialist.