Legislation to restrict guns is a lot like legislation to restrict abortion - it's a tough sell at the federal level because of that pesky Constitution so it requires a friendly court and and a lot of lawyers. States, of course, can do it more easily. Some states have ways to restrict abortions and some states have ways to restrict guns.

Gun restriction proponents like Vice-President Joe Biden would probably like to restrict abortions too. America is the only civilized country that still allows late-term abortions on demand, but abortion doctors don't rush into schools and go on an abortion spree so score one for abortion fans.

Unlike comets, asteroids don't have a trail - with some exceptions.

Spanish researchers observed using the Gran Telescopio Canarias and discovered that something happened around July 1st, 2011 that caused a trail to appear on P/2012 F5 (Gibbs) - perhaps an internal rupture or a collision with another asteroid.

In many animals, the brain is located in a specific structure like the head, along with sensory organs and often together with the mouth.

However, there are distantly related animals which have a nervous system but no brain, like sea anemones and corals.

In a new paper, the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis was used to find out if one of the ends of the sea anemone corresponds to the head of higher animals. To do this the researchers studied the function of genes that control head development in higher animals during the embryonic development of the starlet sea anemone. 

Schizophrenia may affect up to 1 percent of the population, it is diagnosed primarily in the teenage or early adult years, and is associated with problems in mental ability and memory.

People who have a greater familial genetic link to schizophrenia are more likely to see a fall in IQ as they age, even if they do not develop the condition, according to psychologists in a new paper. 

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have not found genetic causes for schizophrenia but familial instances are considered a risk factor. The psychologists used genetic analysis matched with IQ test results to reach their conclusion on how thinking skills change with age. 

Today I spent the better part of the afternoon in the company of 150 high-school students at the Liceo Fermi in Padova, giving a seminar on particle physics in the context of a project called "Masterclasses" which has been active since 2005 and is a big success.

The project aims at students in the last years of their high school and attempts to involve them in the experiments undergoing at the CERN laboratories. Sets of lectures on particle physics and cosmology at the schools are followed by a "hands-on" session at the Physics Department, where students are taught and then tested in recognizing heavy particle decays from event displays.

A lifelong diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids can inhibit growth of breast cancer tumors by 30 percent, according to new research published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, which they say is the first to provide unequivocal evidence that omega-3s reduce cancer risk.

Breast cancer remains the most common form of cancer in women worldwide and is the second leading cause of female cancer deaths. Advocates have long believed diet may significantly help in preventing cancer but epidemiological and experimental studies to back up such claims have been lacking, and human studies have been inconsistent.

Gravity works, it is a dominant force in physics, but at the very large and very small scales it holds a lot of mysteries left to be solved.  Foe example, when it comes to stars in young star clusters the dynamics in these crowded environments cannot be simply explained by the pull of gravity.

After analyzing Hubble Space Telescope images of star cluster NGC 1818 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, researchers at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA) at Peking University in Beijing found more binary star systems toward the periphery of cluster than in the center, the opposite of what they expected. The distribution of binaries is thought to result from complex interactions among stars within young clusters.

In the UK, pharmaceutical innovation seems to be dying. The supply of new medicines has conspicuously dwindled in recent decades but that is not due to innovation issues, it is because regulations have caused the costs of drug development to soar, along with the time it takes to bring a new drug to market: from 3 years in 1960 to 12 in 2000. 

The UK is historically the second largest source of new drug development, generating more than 10% of all new medicines around the globe. The US has historically been the runaway leader though output looks bleak in America as well, for similar reasons.

The hypothesis that tomato fruits from organic farming and greater stressing conditions associated with organic farming leads to more nutritional compounds, such as phenolics and vitamin C, recently got tested.