The far left in America loves government. Advocacy groups are always calling for new laws, new regulations, new bans and more layers of bureaucracy to put a stop to whatever they dislike. The right is increasingly suspicious of it, regarding every policy as a road to George Orwell's "1984".

That was not always the case. In the 1950s and '60s, it was the left who was on the right and the right was on the left. Government meant law and order and the right was opposed to anarchy and protests promoted by the left.

A diet rich in milk products is promoted as strengthening bones and reducing the likelihood of osteoporotic fractures, but dairy lobby marketing aside, actual research related to the benefits of milk for the prevention of fractures or influence on mortality rates has found evidence for and against.
  

A new study finds that high milk intake in women and men is not accompanied by a lower risk of fracture and instead may be associated with a higher rate of death. 

It's great to insist that people should just accept science and medicine but it isn't really practical. The nature of coastal California is that they don't trust vaccines the way religious people in the American south do, Asians are going to believe in acupucture, and the French will think they can be allergic to Bt genetically modified plants but not Bt organic pesticide spray.

Historically, culture has been considered an impediment to health rather than a central determining feature of it. However, a new paper in

By Sam (George T.) Crane, Williams College

By Grant Hill-Cawthorne, University of Sydney and Adam Kamradt-Scott, University of Sydney

Governments have a duty to protect their citizens but the plan to impose mandatory detention on health-care workers being suggested by some Australian states is excessive and unwarranted.

By Stephen Goldstein, University of Pennsylvania

(Inside Science) -- When ducklings head out to bathe in a pool, they usually follow the same individual, new research has found. But do they visit the pool that’s best for everyone, or just the one their chief prefers? This puzzle has made it hard for farmers to know how to provide for all their ducks equally, and for biologists to know what social animals really want.  

It's not easy to blame childhood obesity on sunsets but scholars at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Bristol say that later daylight couldn't hurt - and they even defend daylight savings time, which most people can't find much good to say about.

The scholars analyzed the lifestyles of over 23,000 children aged 5-16 years in nine countries; England, Australia, USA, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Switzerland, Brazil and Madeira and Portugal. They looked for associations between the time of sunset and physical activity levels, measured via waist-worn accelerometers; electronic devices that measure body movement.

In the United States, professional basketball, the NBA, opens its regular season tonight. That means at this time tomorrow there will be talk that some player 'flopped' - fell on the ground to draw a foul and get a chance at a free basket.

A new analysis has found that two-thirds of the falls examined by the group at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev were found to be intentional.  And it happens a lot.

It happens so much because there is insufficient punishment for deception and teams are not doing the math. A cost/benefit analysis of "flopping" finds that 90 percent of the time no penalty is awarded, so as a strategy it is pointless.

By Michal Schwartz, Weizmann Institute of Science; Aleksandra Deczkowska, Weizmann Institute of Science, and Kuti Baruch, Weizmann Institute of Science