Donald Light, professor of comparative health policy at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, says the pharmaceutical industry is a market for 'lemons' -  a market in which the seller knows much more than the buyer about the product and can profit from selling products less effective and even less safe than consumers are led to believe.

Talking at the meeting of the American Sociological Association, he said three reasons why the pharmaceutical market produces "lemons" are: Having companies in charge of testing new drugs, providing firewalls of legal protection behind which information about harms or effectiveness can be hidden, and the relatively low bar set for drug efficacy in order for a new drug to be approved.

Being married has been associated with improving health but a new study suggests that having that long-term bond alters hormones in a way that reduces stress - but you don't need to buy a ring just yet; unmarried people in a committed relationship show the same reduced responses to stress,  said Dario Maestripieri, Professor in Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago and lead author of a new study in Stress. 

A new Rice University study's side-by-side comparison of 10 human genetic models to determine when 'mitochondrial Eve'(mtEve), the maternal ancestor of all living humans, lived uses a very different set of assumptions about the way humans migrated, expanded and spread across Earth - and it won't be without some controversy.

Mitochondrial Eve studies are an example of how scientists probe the genetic past to learn more about mutation, selection and other genetic processes that play key roles in disease but deterministic models may not be enough, says the new study.     Statisticians to the rescue.

Children are natural psychologists and by the time they reach preschool they understand that other people have desires, preferences, beliefs, and emotions too.

Exactly how they learn this isn't clear but a new study says that one way children figure out another's preferences is by using a topic you'd think they won't formally encounter until college: statistics. 

In one experiment, children aged 3 and 4 saw a puppet named "Squirrel" remove five toys of the same type from a container full of toys and happily play with them. Across the children, the toys that Squirrel removed were the same (for example, all five were blue flowers).

What varied, however, were the contents of the container.

Welcome to my first blog entry ever! That the Big Bang is the start of the universe, the mysterious “point of creation”, is stated often still today, even by prominent physicists. It is also not true.

The Big Bang is what you get when you back-extrapolate the today visible expansion of the universe into the past. One gets to the point where there is the so called “reheating” after inflation. The result of reheating is the Big Bang, a hot and dense state for sure, but it is not thought to be the beginning anymore.

The Big Bang is a set of conditions of an extremely hot, dense, expanding Universe that exists after the end of inflation.

The Open Source movement has been an integral part of software development for many years now, and it is starting to explode into the science world. The latest project might even transform brain science communication and understanding to a new level as the new Whole Brain Catalog is now available for anyone to access.

Proof of aliens within 25 years?  What's the basis for this optimism?

Well, of course, it's the Drake equation.  It had to be.  While it is certainly reasonable that everyone has their own perspective and opinion about the likelihood of alien life, it is not reasonable to pretend that the "Drake equation" provides some sort of inside track.

Researchers at the Buck Institute for Age Research writing in the journal Stem Cells say they have successfully used human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to treat rodents afflicted with Parkinson's Disease (PD).

They say the research validates a scalable protocol that the same group had previously developed and can be used to manufacture the type of neurons needed to treat the disease and paves the way for the use of iPSC's in various biomedical applications. 

iPSC research has come strongly into play during the last few years because of limitations on human embryonic stem cell research in the Bush and Obama administrations and are a hot topic among scientists focused on regenerative medicine.

Petermann Ice Island (2010) - The Mörner Version

The world of climate science according to wishful thinkers.

I was raised at the seaside.  I lived through the 1953 floods which resulted from the North Sea storm surge.

Nils-Axel Mörner seems to have visited the seaside once or twice.