A recent study conducted by Mayo Clinic researchers recommends laparoscopic cholecystectomies (surgical removal of the gallbladder) for pediatric patients suffering from gallstones and other gallbladder diseases. 

A cholecystectomy is a surgical procedure performed to remove the gallbladder, a pear-shaped organ located below the liver on the upper right side of the abdomen. The gallbladder is responsible for collecting and storing bile, which is a fluid secreted by the liver.

During a laparoscopic cholecystectomy, four incisions are made in the abdomen. Then, a small video camera and other special tools are used to remove the gallbladder.

Researchers have come step closer to understanding the birth of the sun.

A team led by Dr Maria Lugaro and Professor Alexander Heger, from Monash University, have investigated the solar system's prehistoric phase and the events that led to the birth of the sun. They used radioactivity to date the last time that heavy elements such as gold, silver, platinum, lead and rare-earth elements were added to the solar system matter by the stars that produced them.

For years, researchers at MIT and Harvard University have been working on origami robots — reconfigurable machines that can fold themselves into arbitrary shapes.

In Science, they report their latest milestone, which is a robot made almost entirely from parts produced by a laser cutter that folds itself up and crawls away as soon as batteries are attached to it. 

The robot is built from five layers of materials, all cut according to digital specifications by a laser cutter. The middle layer is copper, etched into an intricate network of electrical leads. It's sandwiched between two structural layers of paper; the outer layers are composed of a shape-memory polymer that folds when heated.

When it comes to elephants, the Wildlife Conservation Society does not believe in conservation. Or sustainability. Instead, existing ivory must be destroyed and legal ivory markets need to be closed. Otherwise, corruption, organized crime, and a lack of enforcement make legal trade in ivory the major contributing to the demise of Africa's elephants.

A new paper says that if we are to conserve wild populations of elephants across all regions of Africa, all domestic and international ivory markets need to be closed and any government stockpiles of ivory destroyed. According to the paper's author, corruption undermines all aspects of controls as long as a legal market remains.

Throughout the 1990s, biofuels were the environmental rage. Everyone from Vice-President Al Gore to Greenpeace touted them as the replacement for fossil fuels. The future belonged to such renewable energy.

Benefited by a Republican Congress that loved science, President George W. Bush mandated and subsidized biofuel energy, but only the final product. The product used to make this ethanol was left up to growers. 

In California, wildfires happen thousands of times per year, even in non-drought years. They happened long before climate change concerns but not factoring wildfires into simplistic parameter-based models of climate change meant we were not getting an accurate picture of the atmospheric reality.

As a quantum state collapses from a quantum superposition to a classical state or a different superposition, it will follow a path known as a quantum trajectory. For each start and end state there is an optimal or "most likely" path, but it is not as easy to predict the path or track it experimentally as a straight-line between two points would be in our everyday, classical world.

A nasal brush test can rapidly and accurately diagnose Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), an incurable and ultimately fatal neurodegenerative disorder.

Up to now, a definitive CJD diagnosis requires testing brain tissue obtained after death or by biopsy in living patients but a new paper in the New England Journal of Medicine shows it can be done through the nose. 

Your stress levels may be another thing you can blame on your mother. Scientists investigating pregnancies in four generations of rats show that inherited epigenetic effects of stress could affect pregnancies for generations. 

The researchers believe that these changes are due to epigenetics - the arrangement and expression of our genes. In most cases this refers to DNA methylation of the nucleotide base pairs. In this study the researchers believe the epigenetic changes are due to microRNA (miRNA) - non-coding RNA molecules that play a role in regulating gene expression.

Southern California is aghast that cities are now enforcing water usage cutbacks during the ongoing drought - it's because during the mandatory restrictions, while the farming regions of central California have met their targets, water usage in southern California actually went up.

They may not know something that most people in California realize - California is a desert and its water comes from dams and rivers north of them in California, and in Colorado. Rather than being a green paradise, California was mostly sparsely-inhabited desert prior to European colonization - its history has been drought and fire, the boom and bust of nature that gives and takes away.