Electronic cigarettes are booming in popularity, thanks to campaigns to reduce smoking and the goodwill of nicotine patches. There's no evidence foe health risks but evidence that they help people quit smoking is also limited, according to a research review in the July/August Journal of Addiction Medicine, the official journal of the American Society of Addiction Medicine.

A new study investigated the value of the Pre-Exhaustion (PreEx) training method and found that that the various arrangements of different exercise protocols is of less relevance than simply performing resistance training exercises with a high intensity of effort within any protocol. 

Dental researchers writing in the Journal of Dentistry are warning parents of the dangers of soft drinks, fruit juice and sports drinks high in acidity- they call those a "triple-threat" of permanent damage to young people's teeth.

In the article, they demonstrate that lifelong damage is caused by acidity to the teeth within the first 30 seconds of acid attack. They also say drinks high in acidity combined with night-time tooth grinding and reflux can cause major, irreversible damage to young people's teeth.

I thought I'd post this because there are many who haven't followed the latest findings, who still think that present day life on the surface of Mars is absolutely impossible because of UV light, ionizing radiation, and perchlorates, and because the atmosphere is in almost perfect chemical equilibrium. 

That is indeed what most scientists believed, prior to about 2008. But it is now generally agreed in the field that if there do turn out to be nutritious warm and wet habitats on the surface of Mars, they will be habitable. 

A pilot program intended to implement and test a cost-saving strategy for orthopedic procedures at hospitals in California failed to meet its goals, succumbing to recruitment challenges, regulatory uncertainty, administrative burden and concerns about financial risk, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

The outcome represents a disappointing effort to widely adopt bundled payments, a much-touted strategy that pays doctors and hospitals one fee for performing a procedure or caring for an illness. The strategy is seen as one of the most-promising ways to curb health care spending.

Sulfur signals in the Antarctic snow have revealed the importance of overlooked atmospheric chemistry for understanding climate, past and future.

The element sulfur is everywhere and occurs in four stable forms, or isotopes, each with a slightly different mass. Ordinary reactions incorporate sulfur isotopes into molecules according to mass. But sometimes sulfur divvies up differently so that the relative ratios of the different isotopes is anomalous. The authors of a new paper measured the direction and degree of that anomaly for individual layers of snow representing a single season's snowfall.

The UAE plans its first Arab spaceship to Mars in 7 years. What's more, they plan to land it on Mars. With this, they are aiming high indeed, as Mars is probably the most difficult place to land a spacecraft in the inner solar system.

I have no idea what their plans are, but it could be a wonderful opportunity to do something truly astonishing - and fly some of the innovative light weight Mars craft that have been developed over the years.

When soccer games are determined by penalty kicks, it's part technical and part psychological. Players at the highest levels have good technical skills but among them, a few players on each team really stand out - and whenever possible, they are taking the kicks. But they will likely be tired and they know if they miss completely there is no chance to score regardless of what the goalie does, so they approach the shot a little more conservatively than they otherwise would, so goalies know if they can simply guess left or right they stand a decent chance of blocking the shot.

Materials that are firmly bonded together with epoxy and other tough adhesives are ubiquitous in modern life — from crowns on teeth to modern composites used in construction. Yet it has proved remarkably difficult to study how these bonds fracture and fail, and how to make them more resistant to such failures.

Now researchers at MIT have found a way to study these bonding failures directly, revealing the crucial role of moisture in setting the stage for failure. 

Autism is not caused by a deficiency of oxytocin,  according to new findings from the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford.