Scientists and policy makers need all the evidence to make informed decisions about medicines but drug research is an area where privacy concerns and transparency are in conflict.

Brain cancer is the primary cause of cancer mortality in children but even when the cancer is cured, the stress of treatment can be harmful to developing brains.

The search is always on for gentler cures and the PedBrain consortium, launched in 2010, has published the results of the first 96 genome analyses of pilocytic astrocytomas. 

Pilocytic astrocytomas are the most common childhood brain tumors. They usually grow very slowly and are often difficult to access by surgery and cannot be completely removed, which means that they can recur. The disease may thus become chronic and have debilitating effects for affected children. 

If you see commercials for brain-training products, the companies all tout laboratory studies and scientific backing for their products in how they can improve your brainpower.

Most intervention studies like these have a critical flaw, notes a new paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science: They do not account for the placebo effect.

Because the Obama administration's Climate Action Plan focuses on cutting carbon emissions by more fuel mileage regulations for American vehicles and are too narrowly focused on "tailpipe emissions", it is unlikely to help, according to a steel trade group. 

 Mandating more cuts in carbon emissions for America by implementing stricter fuel economy regulations is one of the three pillars of the Obama Administration's Climate Action Plan but Lawrence W. Kavanagh, president of the Steel Market Development Institute (SMDI), said "while this is a sound objective, the Administration's strategy to meet this objective is seriously flawed." 

Yoga improves the mood and mental wellbeing of prisoners, say psychologists who report that after a ten-week yoga course, the convicts reported improved mood, reduced stress and were better at a task related to behavior control than those who continued in their normal prison routine.

Back in 1992, Francis Fukuyama famously argued that the advent of Western liberal democracy spelled nothing less than the endpoint of sociocultural evolution: we have finally discovered the best way to govern people and organize society, and that’s gonna be it.

An unknown physiologic mechanism of evolutionary biology has been the ability of mammals to manipulate the sex ratios of their offspring as part of a highly adaptive evolutionary strategy. A new paper analyzing 90 years of breeding records from the San Diego Zoo says that mammalian species can "choose" the sex of their offspring in order to beat the odds and produce extra grandchildren.

According to a survey, fewer Americans overall feeling the blues, with rates of depression in people over 50 on the decline.

Sunshine is out. If you aren't slathering yourself in SPF 150 chemicals to keep it off of you, you're going to get skin cancer and no one will feel bad.

It's not that simple. As we grow older our bones become more fragile and a team of researchers have shown that this bone-aging process can be significantly accelerated through deficiency of vitamin D - which we naturally get from sunshine.

Vitamin D deficiency is a widespread medical condition that has been linked to the health and fracture risk of human bone on the basis of low calcium intake and reduced bone density. Working at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light ALS , the international team demonstrated that vitamin D deficiency also reduces bone quality.  

Every cell in an organism's body has the same copy of DNA, though different cells do different things so some function as brain cells, while others form muscle tissue. How can the same DNA make different things happen? Science is a step closer to answers and maybe even to putting in a piece of the autism puzzle.

Scientists know that much of what a gene does and produces is regulated after it is turned on. A gene first produces an RNA molecule, to which tiny RNA binding proteins (RBPs) bind and control its fate. For example, some of these proteins cut out parts of the RNA molecule so that it makes a particular protein, while other RBPs help destroy the RNA before it even produces a protein.