Decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant just got one step closer. Japanese researchers have mapped the distribution of boron compounds in a model control rod, paving the way for determining re-criticality risk within the reactor.

To this day the precise situation inside the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant is still unclear. "Removing fuel debris from the reactor contaminant vessel is one of the top priorities for decommissioning," says lead author Ryuta Kasada of Kyoto University.

Among critically ill patients, expectations about prognosis often differ between physicians and surrogate decision makers, and the causes are more complicated than the surrogate simply misunderstanding the physicians' assessments of prognosis, according to a study appearing in the May 17 issue of JAMA.

In a study appearing in the May 17 issue of JAMA, Reshma Jagsi, M.D., D.Phil., of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and colleagues conducted a survey of clinician-researchers on career and personal experiences, including questions on gender bias and sexual harassment.

In a 1995 survey, 52 percent of U.S. academic medical faculty women reported harassment in their careers compared with 5 percent of men. These women had begun their careers when women constituted a minority of the medical school class; less is known about the prevalence of such experiences among more recent faculty cohorts.

We’re not even halfway through the year but already you may have heard talk of 2016 being the hottest on record. But how can scientists be so sure we’re going to beat the previous record, set just last year?

A big push is under way in higher education to measure how students are learning and how good lecturers are at teaching them. Universities can track how much time a student spent on a learning module or how often they accessed a journal article or online book.

One belief is that Jupiter's moon Europa has a deep, hidden ocean of salty liquid water beneath its icy shell. Whether the Jovian moon has the raw materials and chemical energy in the right proportions to support biology is a topic of speculation and  the answer may hinge on whether Europa has environments where chemicals are matched in the right proportions to power biological processes. Life on Earth exploited such niches and still does today.

Mountains aren't the first thing that hit you when you look at images of Jupiter's innermost moon, Io. But once you absorb the fact that the moon is slathered in sulfurous lava erupted from 400 active volcanoes, you might turn your attention to scattered bumps and lumps that turn out, on closer inspection, to be Io's version of mountains.There are about 100 of them, and they don't look anything like the low lying volcanoes.

They also don't look like mountains on our home world. While we favor majestic ranges stretching from horizon to horizon, the mountains on Io are isolated peaks of great height that jut up out of nowhere. From space, they look rather like the blocky chips in the fancier kind of chocolate chip cookie.

Fuel cells, which generate electricity from chemical reactions without harmful emissions, have the potential to power everything from cars to portable electronics, and could be cleaner and more efficient than combustion engines.

Solid oxide fuel cells, which rely on low- cost ceramic materials, are among the most efficient and promising type of fuel cell. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have found a way to harness the quantum behavior of these fuel cells to make them even more efficient and robust. In doing so, they've observed a new type of phase transition in an oxide material.

The research is described in the journal Nature.

Controversial evolutionary psychologist  Dr. Satoshi Kanazawahas written a new evolutionary psychology paper arguing that women may have been evolutionarily designed to be sexually fluid, changing their sexual desires and identities from lesbian, to bisexual, to heterosexual and back again, in order to allow them to have sex with their co-wives in polygynous marriages.

This is because it helps in reducing conflict and tension inherent in such marriages while at the same time successfully reproducing with their husbands in heterosexual unions.

Inflammation occurs naturally in the body but when it goes wrong or goes on too long, it can trigger disease processes. Uncontrolled inflammation plays a role in many major diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease.

A new study has identified food stuffs that can help prevent chronic inflammation that contributes to many leading causes of death. Their correlation claims diets rich in fruits and vegetables, which contain polyphenols, protect against age-related inflammation and chronic diseases.

Cell-to-cell communication