People often think hippos are herbivores with big smiling faces. Every now and then, reports of a hippo of hunting down prey, eating a carcass, or stealing prey from a crocodile are heard, but they're typically considered 'aberrant' or 'unusual' behavior. 

Some doctors may recommend that patients with the flu take acetaminophen, or paracetemol, to relieve their symptoms; however, a new randomized clinical trial found no benefits to the over-the-counter medication in terms of fighting the influenza virus or reducing patients' temperature or other symptoms.

The trial included adults between 18 and 65 years of age with confirmed influenza infections who were treated with the maximum recommended dose of paracetamol or placebo for five days. Participants were monitored for up to 14 days.

Carbon dioxide emissions have always been something of a guess because they rely on self-reported figures. The developed world has been transparent but it was only a few years ago that China admitted to under-counting its own emissions, telling a different tale than the pollution clouds that wafted into other countries did.

LAWRENCE -- As delegates from 195 nations meet in Paris to debate mankind's response to global climate change, scientists from the University of Kansas and Rothamsted Research in England today issue a study of a major crop pest that underlines how "climate is changing in more ways than just warming."

Their paper, appearing in Nature Climate Change, shows how large-scale climatic changes drive a coordinated rise and fall of numbers of aphids across Great Britain, even when individual aphid populations in that nation are separated by great distance.

HANOVER, N.H. - Two studies by Dartmouth researchers and their colleagues shed new light on mercury pollution in the waters of the northeastern United States.

The studies -- here and here -- appear in the journal Marine Chemistry. PDFs are available on request.

Designers of Christmas cards used fine art on their products to divert attention away from concerns that that the festival was becoming too commercialised, a University of Exeter academic has found.

While heart-warming pictures of animals or festive decorations on Christmas cards may bring joy throughout December, few would consider these greetings to have great aesthetic merit. But Victorians were able to send each other Christmas cards created by respected artists, made to counter anxiety that growing consumerism was destroying sentiment.

If you think you really made a difference by overlaying your Facebook profile with a French flag, take 10 seconds to sign an online petitition or retweet a celebrity who matches your beliefs about science, you are a "slacktivist" - an activist who doesn't really care enough to do anything worthwhile.

Policymakers dismiss you smf friends don't take you seriously as you flit from cause célèbre to  cause célèbre, but you might be making a difference after all.

Young men's interest in babies is associated with their physiological reactivity to sexually explicit material, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The study showed that young men who reported more interest in babies showed a lower increase in testosterone in response to sexually explicit material than men who weren't as interested in babies.

A native Australian grass that plays dead during droughts and culls its own cells to survive could provide genetic keys to help food crops survive worldwide.

Like other so-called 'resurrection plants', Tripogon loliiformis has the ability to withstand desiccation (being dried out) for prolonged periods and can be revived by water but scientists have never known how these plants actually do it, or if the existing plant cells really do come alive again from a dormant state, or if its new growth is separate from the old cells. Professor Sagadevan Mundree of Queensland University have now proved sugar manipulation and the controlled sacrifice of cells are keys to the native grass's survival.

New research on how our immune system works shows how the body mobilizes a previously unknown defense against viruses and bacteria- and thus why we do not constantly get ill despite the viruses around us. 

Fever, sore muscles and other influenza-like symptoms are typical signs that your immune system is fighting against viruses and bacteria. The unpleasant condition is, among other things, due to the body forming a substance called interferon, which must defeat the virus. For many years researchers and doctors have assumed that this was the body's earliest response when attacked by various infections.