Europe has a rabid distrust of science and medicine and a corresponding higher level of belief in in naturopathy, homeopathy and various other alternative techniques.

Given that, it is little surprise that psychosomatic medicine has taken off in Europe. and especially in Germany. Psychosomatic issues - "it's all in your head" - have a long history but it was popularized by German psychiatrist Dr. Sigmund Freud in the early part of the 20th century. Today, psychiatrists officially disavow treatment for people who might be making it up but others have pursued mind-body relations.

Pigs are a main livestock species for food production worldwide and is also widely used as an animal model in biomedical research. Today we know that the many types of bacteria that inhabit the gut are important for health and disease. Knowledge of the genes of these bacteria and their function therefore constitutes the first step towards a more comprehensive understanding of how bacteria in the gut affect health and disease.

An international consortium of researchers from INRA (France), University of Copenhagen and SEGES (Denmark), BGI-Shenzhen (China) and NIFES (Norway) has now established the first catalog of bacterial genes in the gut of pigs. This achievement is published in the latest issue of Nature Microbiology.

A new study finds that 'an old dog can't learn new tricks' only applies to dogs. In people, older adolescents and adults not only learn certain thinking skills including non-verbal reasoning more effectively than younger people, they learn them better.

And providing a new boost for the marketing departments of 'brain training games', non-verbal reasoning skills can be readily trained and do not represent an innate, fixed ability.

The research involved 558 school pupils aged 11-18 and 105 adults, who were initially tested in various skills and then completed up to 20 days of online training in a particular skill before taking the tests again. They were then tested six months later to see whether the effect of training lasted.

Females outnumber men in biology at the undergraduate and Ph.D. levels and have this entire century. Where do they still lag? Faculty positions.

The issue is clearly not sexism, academia prides itself on being more liberal and inclusive than private sector science, it is the tenure system. Tenured scientists are living longer, continuing to do fine work, and therefore not making way for younger female scientists who have an advantage in hiring now.

As the 23 faithful readers of this blog already know, I recently wrote a book that describes the searches for new physics undertaken by a glorious particle physics experiment, CDF, during the eighties and nineties. The book, titled "Anomaly! Collider physics and the quest for new phenomena at Fermilab", is coming out at the end of November. More information and reviews on the book can be obtained at this link. Or you can directly pre-order the book via AMazon by following the link on the right column here (you may have to scroll down) -->

In a world where individuals have ranked preferences, it is not possible to create a voting procedure that is guaranteed to yield a fair selection between more than two alternatives. This is a mathematical certainty: in 1951 Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow gave the mathematical proof.

Researchers are exploring ways to help clinicians and investigators use and share routinely collected medical data (such as information in electronic health records) to improve care and advance clinical research.

In a recent article, experts note that with the development of platforms enabling the use of routinely collected clinical data in the context of international research, scalable solutions for cross-border and cross-domain interoperability need to be developed.

"We provide insights on the requirements needed to achieve this and the need for a rigorous governance process to ensure the quality of data standardization," said Dr. Christel Daniel, lead author of the Learning Health Systems article.

Proximity is an important influence in consumer decisions on everyday purchases, according to a new survey.

In the survey, 93.2 percent of respondents said they typically travel less than 20 minutes to buy groceries, clothing, gas, and other routine transactions, while 87 percent said they won’t travel beyond 15 minutes for such purchases. For purchases that consumers make at least once per week, the distance they’re willing to travel shrinks even further to ten minutes.

A paper by researchers at LSU Health New Orleans in a little known journal called Translational Cancer Research suggests that age is an important factor in the association between cancer and sugar-sweetened beverages and recommends that intervention programs to reduce consumption of added sugar be focused on lower socio-economic status, young males, as well as cervical cancer survivors. Sugar intake or sugar-sweetened beverage consumption has also been associated with obesity, diabetes and cardio-metabolic diseases, and just about everything else. As more people are surviving cancer, the consumption of added sugar will be an increasingly important risk factor.

According to a music researcher, discrimination of women is common in the club scene. Female DJs don’t get gigs because the music they play is “too feminine.”

It's no secret that elite clubs are fast-tracking customers that fit the "vibe" they are trying to create, but it isn't just the young, pretty ones. If the clothes are wrong, they will not get past the velvet rope, and that's discrimination, argues Tami Gadir, a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo, who is researching women’s experiences in the electronic music scene. She is studying female DJs in particular, but in her experience, the gender differences pervade the electronic club scene in its entirety.