In the many efforts to prevent people from taking up smoking, most initiatives have focused on kids.  As the consumer advocacy group the American Council on Science and Health has long phrased it, "smoking is a pediatric disease." Prevent uptake in the young, and addiction rarely occurs.

But that has led to governments with a big blind spot about young adults, according to a paper in the Canadian Journal of Public Health by Thierry Gagné, a doctoral student at Université de Montréal's School of Public Health.

It’s widely understood that a key reason why life developed on Earth is because of water.  A common definition of a habitable environment is one in which plenty of liquid water is available to sustain life.  In short, we can’t live without water.

Innovative training networks are a European Community concept funded by the Research Executive Agency, under the project called "Marie Curie Actions". The idea is that the EU helps build structures that provide interdisciplinary training to skilled graduate students, providing them with knowledge and skills that make them attractive for the work market and useful to society, while boosting the research projects that the EU is interested in.

JP Aerospace is an interesting company - in the city of Rancho Cordova, CA., California, JP Aerospace, America's OTHER Space Program. Their aim is to develop ways to send airships up into the stratosphere - and more controversially, all the way to orbit with their "Orbital Airships" vision. The airships would accelerate very slowly, at a rate of perhaps a few centimeters per second increase in speed every second, over several days, until they reach orbital velocity. Can they, or can't they, or how far can they go?

The court case over whether ExxonMobil may have deliberately downplayed the potential dangers of global warming is heating up. Eleven attorney generals have filed a brief in US District Court in Manhattan supporting a lawsuit by Exxon to halt a probe by their peers in New York and Massachusetts.

It's manna from heaven for sue-and-settle law firms; a new paper links common antibiotics, such as macrolides, quinolones, tetracyclines, sulfonamides and metronidazole, to an increased risk of miscarriage in early pregnancy.

The association was weak, but juries won't know that, because Dr. Anick Bérard, Faculty of Pharmacy, Université de Montréal, declared, "our investigation shows that certain types of antibiotics are increasing the risk of spontaneous abortion, with a 60% to two-fold increased risk." That's important, since baseline risk of spontaneous abortion is 30 percent, but the women who miscarried in this study were more likely to be older, living alone and to have multiple health issues and infections. 

Does the reality of mental disorders also cause depression, or is depression a harbinger of other disorders, a gateway as it were?

GSI, the Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, is a laboratory located near the town of Darmstadt, in central Germany, just a few miles away from the Frankfurt airport. The centre was founded in 1969, and has since then been a very active facility where heavy elements are studied (six rare heavy ones were in fact discovered there, including the one they named Darmstadtium!), and where a wide research plan of nuclear physics is carried out.

In 2011, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations propose using animals like pigs to study the best way of evaluating protein quality in foods eaten by children.

The researchers behind a new study calculated protein scores for eight sources of protein, derived from both plants and animals. Protein scores compare the amount of digestible amino acids in a food with a "reference protein," a theoretical protein which contains fully digestible amino acids in the proportions required for human nutrition at a particular stage of life.