Want to suck all of the fun out of romance and dating? Talk with a humanities scholar in family dating research. 

Just in time for Valentine's Day, a University of Illinois academic has identified four distinct approaches that dating couples use to develop deeper commitment. "The four types of dating couples that we found included the dramatic couple, the conflict-ridden couple, the socially involved couple, and the partner-focused couple," said Brian Ogolsky, assistant professor of human development and family studies.

The Oxford Dictionaries selected "vape"--as in, to smoke from an electronic cigarette or inhalation device --as word of the year in 2014. Internet users' search behavior tells a similar story. 

New government guidelines claiming a link between alcohol and cancer won't have a direct impact on drinking, but they do raise awareness of harm and so may alter social attitudes towards alcohol, according to an editorial in The BMJ.

Professor Theresa Marteau, Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at the University of Cambridge and a member of the committee that produced the guidelines, concedes there is no evidence about any impact of health related guidelines on behavior, including for alcohol, risk information is still worth a try.  

From paper towels to cups to plastic bottles, products made from recycled materials permeate our lives. One notable exception is building materials. Why can't we recycle concrete from our deteriorating infrastructure for use as material in new buildings and bridges? It's a question that a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame is examining.

Imagine that you're buying a box of chocolates for a loved one on Valentine's Day, and the store is offering a free gift if you buy a slightly inferior box of chocolates instead of the best chocolates in the store. Which do you buy?

You are more likely to go for the inferior box, according to new research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

UPDATE: LIGO has detected gravitational waves.

In recent releases announcing the forthcoming publication of new results on the detection of gravitational waves, the collaborations LIGO and VIRGO, as well as the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France), explicitly (and wrongly) attribute to Albert Einstein the original prediction of th

The age at which an adolescent begins using marijuana may affect typical brain development, according to researchers at the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas. In a paper recently published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, scientists describe how marijuana use, and the age at which use is initiated, may adversely alter brain structures that underlie higher order thinking.

The tropical low pressure area previously known as System 97P has developed into a tropical storm named 11P in the Southwestern Pacific Ocean. NASA's Aqua satellite passed overhead and gathered cloud top temperatures that showed powerful storms within, while NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided a visible image of the storm east of Vanuatu.

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite measured temperatures in Tropical Storm 11P's cloud tops on Feb. 10 at 0229 UTC (Feb. 9 at 9:22 p.m. EST). AIRS provides valuable temperature data for tropical cyclones such as cloud top and sea surface temperatures.

Alzheimer´s disease (AD) is the most common disease underlying memory problems and dementia in the elderly. One of the invariable pathologies in AD is degeneration of cholinergic synapses in brain cortex and hippocampus. Despite enormous effort to find out an efficient treatment, current pharmacological interventions are limited to a few drugs that alleviate symptoms but do not slow down the underlying disease processes. These drugs include inhibitors of cholinesterases, enzymes that degrade the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, or memantine, a modulator of glutamate neurotransmission.