By Robbie Love, Lancaster University

Selfies were so 2013. But vaping’s in: Oxford Dictionaries have announced vape as its international Word of the Year 2014.

The runners up are bae, budtender, contactless, indyref, normcore and slacktivism.

By Ross MacKenzie; Benjamin Hawkins, London School of Hygiene&Tropical Medicine, and Thomas Novotny, San Diego State University

By Dianna Kenny, University of Sydney

I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member. – Groucho Marx

Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to … – Kurt Cobain’s mother upon hearing of the death of her son

What do Otis Redding, Gram Parsons, Nick Drake, Jimmy McCulloch, James Ramey (aka Baby Huey), Bryan Osper, and Jon Guthrie have in common?

New artificial intelligence software uses photos to locate documents on the Internet with far greater accuracy than ever before, showing for the first time that a machine learning algorithm for image recognition and retrieval is accurate and efficient enough to improve large-scale document searches online.

The system uses pixel data in images and potentially video - rather than just text -- to locate documents. It learns to recognize the pixels associated with a search phrase by studying the results from text-based image search engines. The knowledge gleaned from those results can then be applied to other photos without tags or captions, making for more accurate document search results. 

Vehicle fatalities are the most common cause of accidental death around the world. In the US alone, there are 30,000 deaths in car crashes each year. 

Are there inequalities in those figures? According to an epidemiology paper presented yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in New Orleans, there are.

Uzay Kirbiyik, doctoral student in epidemiology at Indiana University, examined risk factors associated with drivers' survival in head-on vehicle collisions by examining Fatality Analysis Reporting System database records in 1,108 crashes.

Imagine we gave you three letters, say G, C and D. Then we gave you a name to associate to some combination of those three letters. How many could you recall on command?

Guitarists in cover bands do that all of the time. They can play thousands of songs from memory, and it's not uncommon in most musicians. There have been numerous studies regarding music and memory and a peek inside the brains of professional musicians adds to that.

Volcanoes have long been known to have an impact on climate - the 1815 Tambora volcanic eruption is famous for its impact on climate worldwide, making 1816 the 'Year Without a Summer'.

Maybe they are the reason global warming has not taken off the way climate researchers estimated it would. Sulfur dioxide gas that eruptions expel might be cooling the atmosphere more than previously thought, contributing to the recent slowdown in global warming, according to a new study.

You can't catch attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) but you wouldn't know that by the way diagnoses are spreading - up 10X in some countries. 

Neurons - cells in the brain that communicate chemical and electrical information - belong to one of two groups, inhibitory or excitatory. Much is known about excitatory neurons but not so much for inhibitory ones.

An epidemiology analysis finds that acculturative stress, which is a term created to highlight that immigrants straddling two different cultures have greater stress than natives, is the reason Latino youth in Indiana have higher suicide and depression rates than white counterparts.

Young people are forced to be one thing in their homes and then also part of the larger outside culture and the conflict
between Latino teens and their parents regarding what they do and how they should act at, for example, school versus home, adds to the pressure of teenage years.