Measuring variability of heart rate may identify premature infants at risk of developing necrotizing enterocolitis, a serious inflammatory condition that can lead to death, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers.

Necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC, may lead to destruction of the intestinal wall and vital organ failure. It affects 6 to 10 percent of premature infants within the first two weeks of life.

A new study has found that 12 minutes of exercise can improve attention and reading comprehension in adolescents.

In the paper, all kids saw improvement in selective visual attention up to 45 minutes after exercising. Selective visual attention is the ability to remain visually focused on something despite distractions. The Lower income students also improved on tests of reading comprehension following the physical activity, though high-income students did not.

The hive mind is alive and well on Twitter.

Rather than being a participatory forum, an analysis of 290,119,348 tweets from 193,522 "politically engaged" Twitter users during the 2012 presidential campaign conventions and debates found little creative thinking. Instead, it was just retweeting "elites" like Bill Maher and Sean Hannity.

By boosting a protein called oligoadenylate synthetases-like (OASL) that naturally exists in our cells, researchers may have found a way to enhance our ability to inhibit viral infections like the flu. 

OASL appears in increased quantities in people with liver cancer caused by the hepatitis C virus. 

Hepatitis C, influenza, the childhood respiratory illness RSV, and many other viruses are known as ribonucleic acid (RNA) viruses, which use RNA as their genetic material when they replicate. The OASL protein enhances cells' ability to detect virus RNA, activating the immune system to sense the virus and inhibit replication.

It doesn't happen often but there are times when its unclear if a football crosses the goal line for a touchdown. If a quarterback attempts a sneak, for example, and the line pushes forward, he may be under too many players to be seen.

All the referees can do is pull people off and look at where the ball is, though there is no idea if that's where it was when his knee touched the ground. A Disney Research team, in collaboration from NC State and Carnegie-Mellon, developed a system that can track a football in three-dimensional space using low-frequency magnetic fields. 

Vani Hari, the Food Babe, has demanded answers

Self-proclaimed Food Babe, Vani Hari has an online petition asking demanding that Anheuser-Busch and Miller Coors, America’s largest beer brands "disclose their full set of ingredients online

The Advanced Wonder Excitement Surprise Original Mechatronic Excellence lab is usually devoted to robot design but recently they took a break to go old school. 

How old school? The 13th century, that's how old school.

An imbalance of female sex hormones caused by vegetarian foods like soy may be contributing to high levels of male obesity, according to a recent paper.

In US states that strongly embrace myriad anti-science beliefs, like California, Washington and New York, dangerous preventable diseases like Whooping Cough have come roaring back after a long hiatus, due to a belief by cultural elites that as long as uneducated poor people get vaccines, things will be fine.

It is going to take a lot to combat the entrenched mentality that causes some to distrust science and medicine, because groups have spent a lot of money promoting conspiracy stories about pharmaceutical companies and doctors and selling their 'alternative' medicine. It will take education, awareness and nurses can help, write Emily Peake, APRN, MSN, FNP-C, CLC, and Lisa K. McGuire, MSN, MBA-HCM, RN.

On my first day at the Erice School of Science Journalism this past week I attended a lecture by Alessio Cimarelli, who discussed "When Data Journalism meets Science: a "Hackathon"". The speaker (who owns the site called "dataninja") showed several examples of how to mine the web to construct databases and display results on several topics. It was quite interesting to see the techniques he used, but I felt compelled to interrupt him at some point, in the interest of the school participants.