Anti-smoking activists have made some ridiculous claims about smoking and the associated health risks. In recent years, studies have suggested that movies encourage teenagers to pick up the habit, any exposure to secondhand smoke is dangerous, and that such a thing as ‘third hand smoke’ exists. But a new study in Environmental Health may be the greatest example of exaggeration on the issue ever.

A new report from the National Research Council suggests that naturally occurring methane hydrate may represent an enormous source of methane, the main component of natural gas, and could ultimately augment conventional natural gas supplies. Although a number of challenges require attention before commercial production can be realized, no technical challenges have been identified as insurmountable.

Moreover, the U.S. Department of Energy's Methane Hydrate Research and Development Program has made considerable progress in the past five years toward understanding and developing methane hydrate as a possible energy resource, the report claims.

Writing in PLoS Genetics, UCLA Researchers say they have performed the first complete genomic sequencing of a brain cancer cell line, a discovery that may lead to personalized treatments based on the unique biological signature of an individual's cancer and a finding that may unveil new molecular targets for which more effective and less toxic drugs can be developed.

A new study in Acta Paediatrica suggests that parents of four and five-year-olds may be unaware that their children are at an unhealthy weight.  Half of the mothers who took part in the new study thought that their obese four or five year-old was normal weight, as did 39 per cent of the fathers.

When it came to overweight children, 75 per cent of mothers and 77 per cent of fathers thought that their child was normal weight. More than 800 parents of 439 children took part in the study, carried out by researchers from the University Medical Centre Groningen in The Netherlands. Five per cent of the children were overweight, four were obese and the rest were normal weight.

In recent years, climate change hasn't proceeded as most scientists expected. Global surface temperatures have not risen as fast in the last decade as they did in the 1980s and 1990s, and researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) say they may know why--fluctuations in stratospheric water vapor. The team's new study in Science suggests that Just a 10 percent drop in water vapor ten miles above Earth’s surface has had a big impact on global warming.

Here is an article relating to a discussion about the qualifications of mental health professionals in assessing the long-term effects of torture.

There is extensive research, they argue, that torture causes long-term
mental health problems. However, "we do not yet have the scientific
knowledge to predict with any precision what the psychological outcome
will be for an individual."