There has long been a hypothesis that a starvation diet can extend lifespan.

The only way it was really shown was by weaning mice on such a diet - and that isn't really ethical for human babies. And it doesn't work in the wild, because dietary restriction compromises the immune system’s ability to fight off disease and reduces the muscle strength necessary to flee a predator. Most animals don't live long enough to catch 'old age' diseases like cancer and the late-life pathologies that humans do.

What do you think about computer-generated news articles? Would you even know?

Recently, Google has tried to penalize 'content farms' - especially companies that look for keywords, terms and trends in searches and automatically generate articles that will show up in search results but are just copied and pasted.

People who smoke high-potency cannabis end up getting higher doses of THC even if they might reduce the amount they puff and inhale to compensate for the higher strength Result: they still take in more THC than smokers of lower potency cannabis.

An area of the canine brain associated with reward responds more strongly to the scents of familiar humans than it does to the scents of other humans, or even to those of familiar dogs.

The journal Behavioural Processes published the results of the first brain-imaging study of dogs responding to biological odors. The research was led by Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University.

CHESTNUT HILL, MA (March 17th): Workplace flexibility – it's a phrase that might be appealing to job seekers or make a company look good, but a new study by the Sloan Center on Aging and Work at Boston College shows flexible work options are out of reach for most employees and that when they are offered, arrangements are limited in size and scope.

University of Cincinnati researchers are reporting on the educational and health benefits of specially created outdoor play environments for children. Victoria Carr, a UC associate professor of education and director of the UC Arlitt Child and Family Research and Education Center, and Eleanor Luken, a former UC research associate for the Arlitt Center and current doctoral student at City University of New York, take a look at this growing trend around the world in an article published this month in the International Journal of Play.

We all feel stressed but a new paper finds that how we deal with it is different - even in as broad a category as men and women. Stressed women apparently become more "prosocial". 

A new study finds that sea anemones display a genomic landscape with a complexity of regulatory elements similar to that of fruit flies or other animal model systems, which suggests that this principle of gene regulation is already 600 million years old and dates back to the common ancestor of human, fly and sea anemone.

But sea anemones are more similar to plants rather to vertebrates or insects in their regulation of gene expression by short regulatory RNAs called microRNAs.  

Archaeologists have found the oldest complete example in the world of a human with metastatic cancer in a 3,000 year-old skeleton. 

Just 20 percent of UK people with hearing problems actually wear a hearing aid, according to a new analysis in the journal Ear and Hearing which looked at the habits of 160,000 aged 40 to 69 years.

The results showed that 10.7 per cent of adults had significant hearing problems when listening to speech in the presence of background noise but only 2.1 per cent used a hearing aid.  One in 10 middle aged adults had substantial hearing problems and were more likely to be from a working class or ethnic minority background.