Two invasive species of mosquitoes that can carry Zika, dengue, yellow fever and other dangerous viruses are spreading in California — and have been found as far north as Sacramento and Placer counties.

There are now 16 counties where Aedes aegypti, commonly known as the yellow fever mosquito, has been detected, according to the state Department of Public Health. Five of those counties have also detected Aedes albopictus, the Asian tiger mosquito.

This week's Plot relates to the search of rare decays of the Higgs boson, through the analysis of the large amounts of proton-proton collision data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN's marvelous 27km particle accelerator. The ATLAS collaboration, which is one of the four main scientific equipes looking at LHC collisions, produced an improved bound on the rate at which Higgs bosons may decay to electron-positron pairs (which they are expected to do, although very rarely, in the Standard Model, SM) and to electron-muon pairs (which are forbidden in the SM).

HILLSBORO, Ore. — On Kimberly Repp’s office wall is a sign in Latin: Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae. This is a place where the dead delight in helping the living.

For medical examiners, it’s a mission. Their job is to investigate deaths and learn from them, for the benefit of us all. Repp, however, isn’t a medical examiner; she’s a Ph.D. microbiologist. And as the Washington County epidemiologist, she was most accustomed to studying infectious diseases like flu or norovirus outbreaks among the living.

More than half of adults and one third of children in Europe are classified as overweight or obese, with the highest proportion coming from lower socio-economic groups where Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) is prevalent.

NAFLD is the accumulation of excess fat in the liver and has become the most common cause of liver disease in Europe due to the rapid rise in levels of obesity. It is a major European health burden resulting in liver cirrhosis and liver cancer, as well as big increases in cardiovascular disease and non-liver cancers.

Lack of physical activity and excess calorie intake leads to weight gain and fat deposition, which plays a major role in the development and progression of NAFLD.

Though a modern naturalism movement has tried to shame mothers who don't, won't, or can't breastfeed, using bottles of animal milk - the prehistoric version of formula - turns out to be an ancient tradition.

Infant feeding vessels made of clay first appear in Europe in the Neolithic and became more commonplace throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. The vessels are small enough to fit in a baby's hands, have a spout, and sometimes even feet and are shaped like imaginary animals. 

A new paper looked at farm workers in Hawaii and found that before 1999 some of them had more heart attacks than non-farm workers and concluded the reason must be safe levels of pesticide exposure creating "subtle effects" over time.

Epidemiology can achieve anything, like show that autism is linked to organic food, if the correlates are tortured enough. 

The confounders are obvious, like that the level of exposure to pesticides made no difference, but the authors declare their correlation is probably valid because a similar link was created in Taiwanese men who were exposed to high levels of pesticides.

A new study worries that teabags containing plastic come with a dose of micro- and nano-sized plastics.

Opposing views on e-cigarettes, witnesses interrupting members of Congress and even a wink. A hearing Tuesday on the epidemic of respiratory injuries linked to vaping was one unusual show.

Since the spring, hundreds of reports have surfaced about severe lung injuries associated with vaping and using e-cigarettes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified at least 530 cases, including at least seven deaths, and states have reported two others.

In recent weeks, as the news crept wider into the headlines, it galvanized state and federal public health officials to warn people against vaping until the crisis is better understood.

Everyone is a mutant but some are prone to diverge more than others. The difference is largely based on two influences. One is the age of a child's parents. A child born to a father who is 35 years old will likely have more mutations than a sibling born to the same father at 25. 

The second is that the effects of parental age on mutation rates differ considerably among families -- much more than had been previously appreciated. In one family, a child may have two additional mutations compared to a sibling born when their parents were ten years younger. Two siblings born ten years apart to a different set of parents may vary by more than 30 mutations.

Impostor syndrome is where people feel like frauds even if they are actually capable and well-qualified. A new group of interviews finds that impostor syndrome is quite common and uncovers one of the best -- and worst -- ways to cope with such feelings.