Scientists using tracking data from Garwood Valley in the McMurdo Dry Valleys region of Antarctica have documented an acceleration in the melt rate of permafrost - ground ice - in a section of Antarctica where the ice had been considered stable.

The melt rates are comparable with the Arctic, where accelerated melting of permafrost has become a regularly recurring phenomenon, and the change could offer a preview of melting permafrost in other parts of a warming Antarctic continent, says Joseph Levy, a research associate at The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics.

The paper in Scientific Reports

For almost a century, science has been engaged in a quest to study brain waves and learn about mental health and the way we think.

It hasn't been easy. The way billions of interconnected neurons work together to produce brain waves remains unknown. Researchers from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne's Blue Brain Project in Switzerland and the Allen Institute for Brain Science in the United States say that their numerical model is providing a new tool to solve the mystery.

Regular marijuana use in adolescence may permanently impair brain function, cognition and increase the risk of developing serious psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, according to a recent study in Neuropsychopharmacology.

Stem cell gene therapy has been used to treat a fatal genetic brain disease - Sanfilippo, which in human children causes progressive dementia and death - in mice for the first time. 

The researchers are hoping to begin a clinical trial within two years.

Male guppies must not be very sexy, because they have evolved an extreme way to hold on to a female that interests them, even if that affection is unrequited: claws on their genitals to make it more difficult for unreceptive females to get away during mating.

Walking helps people in lots of ways but a paper in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine (now JAMA Pediatrics) has a new benefit; adolescent girls who walk to school show a cognitive boost compared to girls who travel by bus or car.

But distance matters. Girls who walk more than 15 minutes showed more benefit than those who live closer and have a shorter walk to school.

The results come from findings of the nationwide AVENA (Food and Assessment of the Nutritional Status of Spanish Adolescents) study, which they say is the first international study that associates mode of commuting to school and cognitive performance.

Some people are worried that unthinking, uncaring robots will be part of our future.  They are concerned about a Cylon uprising or maybe a Terminator, but that is unlikely to happen any time soon; there hasn't been a true advancement in artificial intelligence since the early 1990s, all we know is that the brain is a lot more complicated than making faster CPUs, regardless of what Ray Kurzweil sells to the public in books (and now from a nice gig at Google also).

The rate of unnecessary cancer scans for low-risk prostate cancer patients - the kind of defensive medicine that is a large chunk of medical costs in America - plummeted in Sweden in the decade following a joint campaign to curtail such tests by Swedish County Councils and the National Prostate Cancer Register (NPCR) of Sweden. 

The results in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute suggest that reducing the costs of healthcare in the US - an urgent priority now that the government has mandated it and intends to subsidize it - can be achieved without significant risk.

What's the diet for a high performance athlete? Despite the cultural pendulum of fad diets swinging back toward fat, high fiber, low-fat foods balanced with a training regimen remains the best way to maintain muscle while burning fat.

There are valley networks branching across the Martian surface, which makes it reasonable to believe that water once flowed on the Red Planet.

Where water might have come from would be another mystery. Whether it bubbled up from underground or fell as rain or snow is the subject of speculation and debate but a new study says it can put a new check mark in the 'precipitation' column. The authors say that water-carved valleys at four different locations on Mars appear to have been caused by runoff from orographic precipitation — snow or rain that falls when moist prevailing winds are pushed upward by mountain ridges.