Does clean air have a cost where it makes sense versus where it doesn't? What about human life in general?  

Economists still try to create a metric and a group from the University of Chicago and MIT tackled the financial results of extensive environmental regulations, which have brought cleaner air and health improvements to the United States but also increased the cost of manufacturing and led to reduced industrial productivity along with outsourcing jobs. 

Biologists of the coming decade are going to need to know a whole lot of physics, math and statistics. Everyone is going to need to do more math, really. The days when it was just a language science used here and there is long gone.

There is a common belief that men are empowered sexually. Men know this is silly, of course. It is women who decide each day if they want to have sex or not, not men.  It's in college that young men learn this lesson.

Gold has reached an all-time high and researchers have discovered a bacterium's ability to withstand incredible amounts of toxicity is key to creating 24-karat gold.  

Alchemy was once a pipe dream of ancient chemistry but now it is entirely possible, if you have enough energy.  In the metal-tolerant bacteria Cupriavidus metallidurans it instead takes massive amounts of toxicity; the bacterium can grow on gold chloride, liquid gold, a toxic chemical compound found in nature.

A new study says that the use of herbicides in the production of three genetically modified herbicide-tolerant crops, cotton, soybeans and corn, has gone up rather than down. The counterintuitive estimate is based on an analysis of publicly available data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agriculture Statistics Service. 

Here is a missing link story that won't make evolutionary biologists crazy. Epigenetics is the most recent craze in science media discussions of biology, it analyzes specific patterns of chemical tags that overlay the DNA structure, determining how tightly the DNA is packaged and how accessible certain genes are to be switched on or off. Epigenetics shows us that the genetic code held within DNA represents only part of the blueprint of life. Because it is not understood, we even get speculation that voting preferences can be framed in termed of epigenetics, like in the brain.

It seems that as this discussion continues, more and more concepts become conflated producing all manner of irrelevant comparisons that create more and more confusion.

In the first place, we have the problem of defining what we even mean by food safety.  Truth be told, we don't have any idea what constitutes "safe" food beyond the fact that we may have a history of consuming it without obvious incidence.  Even here, we have a basic problem because many people may have allergies or sensitivites that have always existed, or are now being recognized.

If you watched "Wall-E" you likely laughed at the depiction of hugely obese people riding around in hover cars drinking Big Gulps - surely a science that could create the technology to generate an entire artificial world could solve how to drink Big Gulps without turning ban happy like California or New York.

Now that we had a hot summer, local weather effects are once again proof of global warming. The American mid-west had resisted BBC articles and journal press releases about how global global warming was and stayed about the same before finally doing its part and having a heat wave.

That anomalous summer has put climate change back at the top of the political agenda but despite that, no one is comfortable doing actual weather and climate forecasting.

It's very likely that whichever prostate cancer treatment you choose - prostatectomy surgery, hormone therapy, brachytherapy, external beam radiation, or HIFU (high intensity focused ultrasound) - you will see an impact on your sex life. Exactly how depends on which method you choose and your dedication to getting back in bed.

"Once patients are assured that they will have sex after prostate removal surgery, they can shift their focus to enjoying sex as soon as possible," encourages Dr. David Samadi, creator of the SMART (Samadi Modified Advanced Robotic Technique) robotic prostate removal surgery.