If you can scorch a baseball over the mound, you can thank extinct ancestors.

That's not to say that, despite what an evolutionary psychologist might contend, our ability to throw fast and accurately evolved so our ancestors could play ball better and therefore get more dates.

Instead, this ability first evolved nearly 2 million years ago -  humans are unique in our throwing ability - to aid in hunting. 

Claims from Chen-Yu Zhang's group at China's Nanjing University made international headlines when they reported that, after mice ate lettuce, bits of genetic material from the plants made its way into their bloodstreams intact - and could turn the animals' own genes off.

Miracle vegetable of the week journalists said it was a triumph for the promise of medicinal food. Scare journalism of the week writers instead worried that genetically modified food might modify consumers in unanticipated ways.

Look for actual science to receive far less attention.

A computer analysis of nearly 2 million Tweets on the Twitter online social network revealed another divide in the religious culture war - while atheists engage in more analytical thinking, Christians use more positive words and fewer negative words.

To identify Christian and atheist Twitter users, the researchers studied the tweets of more than 16,000 followers of a few prominent Christian and atheist personalities on Twitter. They analyzed the tweets for their emotional content (the use of more positive or negative words), the frequency of words (such as "friend" and "brother") that are related to social processes, and the frequency of their use of words (such as "because" and "think") that are associated with an analytical thinking style.

Despite, the hype, and though the Apple iPad® is being used for intraoperative procedure guidance, percutaneous procedure planning and mobile interpretation of some imaging examinations - rather limited benefit - the majority of radiology residents are using it instead as a really expensive way to read journals, according to a paper in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

A total of 38 radiology residents in the radiology program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston were provided with iPad 2 tablets and subscriptions to e-Anatomy and STATdx. After six months of device use, residents were surveyed to assess their opinions regarding the technology as a tool for education and clinical practice.

During the last American presidential election, the Obama team highlighted that support for their victory was across the board - 8 of the 10 wealthiest counties in America had gone their way, which was meant to show that rich people believed in his vision also.

That means 8 of 10 counties feel something must be done about climate change, but if an analysis of Swiss homes is similar to America, they mean someone else must do the changing. 

Writing in Environmental Science&Technology, Dominik Saner and colleagues found that energy conservation in a small number of households could go a long way to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

We constantly grow new skin and shed the old but no one is sure exactly how it works. New research says they may provide the answer. 

Engineers and biologists at the University of Sheffield say a recent hypothesis - that skin has 'sleeping' stem cells which can be woken up when required - best explains how our skin constantly regrows. The research, conducted by The Procter&Gamble Company (P&G), makers of Olay, and the University of Sheffield and published in Nature Scientific Reports, may have implications for combating the effects of aging.

When it comes to disparities in gender among various, there are no limits to the hypotheses laid out to explain differences, usually in sync with the cultural agenda of the proponent. Engineering, for example, pays women more equally than any field in America but has far fewer women than environmentalist groups, which pay women about $.70 compared to men - yet engineering is criticized for having fewer women. Medical doctors have equal representation while the social sciences have fewer men and the hard sciences have fewer women.

Trisomy 21, commonly called Down syndrome, is a genetic condition in which a person has 47 chromosomes instead of the usual 46 - three of the #21 chromosomes, rather than the usual two.(1) 

Down syndrome  is one of the most common genetic birth defects, affecting approximately one in 800 to 1,000 babies, and includes a combination of mental retardation, characteristic facial features and, often, heart defects, visual and hearing impairment, and other health problems. 
It is very often accompanied by pathologies found in the general population: Alzheimer's disease, leukemia, or cardiac deficiency. 

A group of investigators from San Diego State University's Brain Development Imaging Laboratory say they can see the effects of autism on the brain. They conclude that connectivity between the thalamus, a deep brain structure crucial for sensory and motor functions, and the cerebral cortex, the brain's outer layer, is impaired in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

The largest investigation to-date has found a dramatic increase in the number of hospitalizations for children with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) during the past decade in the United States. But does that mean there are actually more cases?