Some cultures have demonized alcohol while others have welcomed it. Modern research has confirmed that over indulgence in alcohol is bad for you but also shown that moderate drinking increases health and life expectancy. Most of the beneficial effects appear related to the heart and circulation – but not all. Recently, positive effects of alcohol have been shown for both Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes – but these are less clear cut.

Just a few years ago, I was a practicing naturopathic doctor. I considered myself to be a primary care physician who had been trained in the best of two worlds: supposedly, one was modern medicine and the other was a mixture of alternative practices based in “ancient wisdom.”

Philadelphia, PA, June 20, 2016 - Cannabis use during pregnancy is associated with abnormal brain structure in children, according to a new study in Biological Psychiatry.

Compared with unexposed children, those who were prenatally exposed to cannabis had a thicker prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in complex cognition, decision-making, and working memory.

Author of the study Dr. Hanan El Marroun, of Erasmus University Medical Center in The Netherlands, said: "this study is important because cannabis use during pregnancy is relatively common and we know very little about the potential consequences of cannabis exposure during pregnancy and brain development later in life."

As Republican and Democratic parties prepare for national conventions this summer, campaign speeches are filled with promises about everything from health care to the economy and national security.

But a national poll suggests presumptive presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump may want to consider their positions on a less-talked about topic: children's health.

Greenland's glaciers are melting, but they do that every year. However, a recent computer simulation sounds the alarm about a 50 percent increase in the freshwater flux since 1990, which is too narrow a timeframe for scientific purposes, it is the target date for the original Kyoto treaty on global warming, but will be a clarion for policy makers. 

Whole Foods shoppers and other anti-science groups may not like it, but scientists have taken the first step of an ongoing-process designed to bring a valuable heirloom wheat back from the brink of extinction. 

Solar energy wants to become an alternative source to fossil fuels but no one wants to incur the much higher cost required by continued subsidies. Rather than  trying to create large solar farms, which are invariably blocked by environmental lawsuits, the move is on to go small and avoid regulations - that means on buildings, clothes, consumer electronics and wearables. This necessitates ultra-thin film, low-cost and ideally flexible solar cells without compromising the environment during production, use, or disposal.

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) develops through chromosomal alterations in blood-forming cells of the bone marrow and usually occurs in older persons. Around 20 percent of adults diagnosed with leukemia suffer from this type of blood cancer.

We know water is essential to life as we know it, but why? 

A paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides strongest evidence that proteins--the large and complex molecules that fold into particular shapes to enable biological reactions--can't fold themselves. Rather, the work of folding is done by much smaller water molecules, which surround proteins and push and pull at them to make them fold a certain way in fractions of a second, like scores of tiny origami artists folding a giant sheet of paper at blazingly fast speeds.

Researchers of Aalto University have developed surfaces where oil transports itself to desired directions. Researchers' oleophobic surfaces are microtextured with radial arrays of undercut stripes. When oil drops fall on surfaces, drops move away from the landing point to the direction set by asymmetric geometrical patterning of the surface. The surfaces open up new avenues for power-free liquid transportation and oil contamination self-removal applications in analytical and fluidic devices.

- We developed surfaces that are able to move liquid oil droplets by surface tension forces. Droplets from anywhere within the pattern will spontaneously move to the center of the pattern, tells Postdoctoral Researcher Ville Jokinen.