The lipid ceramide, long known to help keep skin smooth, also helps algae swim toward the light and appears to enable one type of brain cell to keep cerebrospinal fluid moving, researchers report in a new paper. 

Ceramide helps make and keep in motion hairlike projections called motile cilia found in algae and in brains. 

"It's important to know how you regulate your cilia because they can become dysfunctional by stroke, by Alzheimer's, by inflammation, even by aging," said Dr. Erhard Bieberich, neuroscientist in the Medical College of Georgia Department of Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine.

Chemsex, the unfortunately chosen term for sex under the influence of illegal drugs (unfortunate because it connotes chemistry with illegal, when love is clearly a chemistry event in the brain) - needs to become a public health priority, argue experts in The BMJ. This intentional sex under the influence of psychoactive drugs occurs mostly among gay men.

Chemsex usually refers particularly to the use of mephedrone, gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB), gamma-butyrolactone (GBL), and crystallized methamphetamine. The drugs are often used in combination to facilitate sexual sessions lasting several hours or even days, with multiple sexual partners.

Because light travels far faster than sound, we see distant events before we hear them. Perhaps as a child you learned to count the seconds between a lightning flash and the sound of thunder to estimate its distance. 

A new paper says that our brains can also detect and process sound delays that are too short to be noticed consciously. And they found that we use even that unconscious information to fine tune what our eyes see when estimating distances to nearby events. 

In a new study, infants remained calm twice as long when listening to a song as when listening to speech. The study involved thirty healthy infants aged between six and nine months.

Humans like music biologically, according to one hypothesis. In adults and older children, this "entrainment" may be displayed by behaviors such as foot-tapping, head-nodding, or drumming. 

"Emotional self-control is obviously not developed in infants, and we believe singing helps babies and children develop this capacity," says Professor Isabelle Peretz of the  University of Montreal. 

In the film version of "The Martian", the main character is trapped on the red planet and is forced to figure out how to grow food. He declares he is going to "science the s--t out of" the issue before instead engaging in regular old agriculture mixed with some engineering.

But science may soon help, researchers have discovered a gene that could open the door for space-based food production. Professor Peter Waterhouse, a plant geneticist at QUT, discovered the gene in the ancient Australian native tobacco plant Nicotiana benthamiana, known as Pitjuri to indigenous Aboriginals tribes, which has been used for decades as a model plant upon which to test viruses and vaccines.

Want to be an athlete but think it is too much work?

Psychoactive drugs may be the answer.

Let's face it, exercise is a lot of work. Our ancestors worked all of the time and they lived to be 35 so we have clearly evolved to be lazy. Effort is the largest barrier to why people do not exercise so Professor Samuele Marcora at University of Kent suggests that reducing perception of effort during exercise using caffeine or other psychoactive drugs (e.g. methylphenidate and modafinil) could help many people stick to their fitness plans. By fooling them into thinking it is less effort than it is.

Products like milk have been fortified with Vitamin D for decades because of its importance in uptake of calcium in the bones, along with other cellular and immune processes. The body creates vitamin D in the form of cholecalciferol within the skin itself, if there is a sufficient amount of sunlight. 

A new survey reveals that couples enjoyed more frequent and satisfying sex for both partners when men made a fair contribution to housework. The same paper also says there's no relationship between the amount of housework male partners completed and the sexual functioning of a couple.

Using solar or wind power to produce carbon-based fuels is a self-defeating approach to making a greener world, but when governments decide to engage in advocacy rather than science, and throw money at problems, bad corporate habits are learned. Instead of funding more basic research to make green energy viable, the White House opted to engage China in a price war on solar panels, and $72 billion later we have the same issues.

This week I am in Warsaw, where I attend the XI workshop on particle correlations and femtoscopy. I am actually here to give a seminar on statistical methods in particle physics next Thursday, but of course I am also going to try and deepen my understanding of the field of investigations of heavy ion collisions.

Jan Pluta, one of the old-schoolers of the field, gave an introductory talk this morning. It was titled "A brief history of femtoscopy and particle correlations - a personal view". I am reporting below some impressions from his presentation.

What is femtoscopy ? Jan started by warning that he would indeed only give a personal view of the history of the field, and that the view of others may be very different.