The problem with your diet is not that you’ve been eating the wrong food, but rather you’ve been thinking about your food all wrong.  According to Alia Crum, a clinical psychology researcher at Yale University, our mind’s opinion of food labeled or thought of to be “diet” or “low fat” can actually affect our body’s physiological response after eating it, which changes our metabolism.  

Her sneaky research team told 46 volunteers that they were getting two milkshakes to drink.  In the first test, they were told they were sampling a “health” shake that had no fat, no added sugar and a skinny 140 calories.  At a separate test, the same group were told they were rewarded with an “indulgent” shake weighing in at a guilt-inducing 620 calories and full of fat.

You know a problem is real when academics say they don't need 5 more years of funding to know what is going to happen.  

But that's the situation in the Great Lakes and the threated posed by Asian carp, according to Bill Taylor, University Distinguished professor in global fisheries sustainability at Michigan State University .    "The costs of hydrological separation are high, but it's a one-time expense and remediation in the Great Lakes from these invasive species will eventually make separation look cheap."

Over all that quantum physics lately, I have totally neglected a much more important issue: our happiness. And I mean true happiness of course, not the fake stuff you get from a loving family and friends as the slave drivers try to make you believe is what you must settle for. True happiness, that we scientists surely can all agree on, needs chemicals, like serotonin, THC, and so on.

One totally misunderstood little gem in this arena is the Nutmeg, a fruit (nut ?) harvested from the Myristica fragrans tree. Therefore the title, get it? No, it wouldn’t mean anything else – what could it possibly?

Francis Thackeray, a South African anthropologist and the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, has asked permission from the Church of England to exhume the remains of William Shakespeare. This would allow a team of researchers to study the cause of death of the Bard of Avon, as well as look for evidence of drug use, which depends on the presence of hair and finger or toe nails.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s federal regulatory process is stifling commercial investment in the development of genetically engineered animals for food, warns a task force led by a U.C. Davis animal scientist, and that could have serious implications for agriculture and food security in the United States.

Clouding the science issues are anti-science opposition groups that seek to delay or obstruct approval by co-opting regulations and concerns about labeling requirements.  The FDA does not require that food labels include information about production methods, such as genetic engineering or organic processes, unless those processes result in a material difference in the product. 

A quasar named ULAS J1120+0641, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet discovered in the early Universe - yet. 

On a recent post, I was asked how facilitated communication supporters explain the tests that show FC doesn't work. On something so easily shown to be false, why does this persist?

Why are major organizations like the Autism Society (and apparently Autism Now) supporters of the thoroughly debunked facilitated communication?

Why can't more people see through feel-good stories where previously locked-away children suddenly start doing college-level work when they get facilitated, or just as bad, rapid prompting?

Parental stress seems to influence the progeny of organisms. For example, studies have shown that, if mice are stressed, their offspring will show signs of anxiety, even if they receive the usual levels of maternal care. Such epigenetic effects do not alter the DNA sequence, but leave genetic ‘marks’ on genes that influence how active these are. There are some ideas that health issues such as obesity or mental illness could be the result of stress on the parents.

But the changes in the inherited DNA that might give rise to these effects have proved difficult to identify. Now, research  on fruit flies appears to have elucidated a mechanism that allows the effects of stress to be passed on without having to alter genes.