Ready, set, type! Maksim Kabakou/Shutterstock

By Sally O'Reilly, The Open University

The "Cambrian explosion," the rapid diversification of animal life in the fossil record 530 million years ago, has by necessity remained the subjective of speculation. We know it happened, but no idea why, we simply know we wouldn't be here without it.

Last week, the Obama administration stated that it will fine over 2,600 hospitals because too many Medicare patients treated at those hospitals end up back in the hospital within 30 days of going home. 

Over 200,000 doctors have said they will no longer participate in the Affordable Care Act - Obamacare - because of high costs, low payouts, and Byzantine mazes of paperwork, so it seems bad to be driving hospitals away from the programs also - the ones affected primarily treat poor and minority patients.

The administration added two new conditions in this round of penalties: elective hip and knee replacement and chronic lung disease. 

California and Arizona recently began registering ‘benefit corporations.’ A small California non-profit university with which I’m acquainted has commenced the transition to for-profit, b-corp status.

Resveratrol has long been touted in news outlets and health blogs as a 2000s miracle product, with little evidence it helps people. It instead benefited from a kind of 'Glaxo would not paid $720 million if it didn't work' veneer.

One of the claims is that it should be used  as a complement to exercise and to enhance performance but it not only may not enhance the effects of high-intensity interval training (HIIT), it may hurt it.

Cell division is central to life and the last stage, when two daughter cells split from each other, has fascinated scientists since the dawn of cellular biology.

The name given to this process by those early biologists, cytokinesis, translates as "cell movement" and captures the sense of a highly active and organized series of events. Studying the final step, when the dividing cell creates a furrow before cleaving in two, has been difficult.  How does the cell signal where the furrow should be?  

It is just about impossible to find any written entity that is essentially 100% incorrect. Yet, Vani Hari, formerly known "The Food Babe," (and henceforth as "The Food Boob") manages to come pretty damn close. It was a Herculean effort, and should be acknowledged as such.

If you lived in Hilazon Tachtit, near  the Hilazon river of Israel 12,000 years ago, you might have borne witness to a world first; the earliest known religious ceremony.

Though young people are pleased that the federal government has declared they are not actually adults until age 26 when it comes to having to pay bills, adults who remember being teenagers know that teens don't actually buy into that - they feel mature, especially when it comes to things they want to do.

It is no surprise that young people favor more liberal marijuana laws. In 2014, marijuana is just as cool as smoking cigarettes was in 1954. And like in 1954, proponents gloss over the obvious health risks while governments insist they should get the tax revenue because people will do it anyway.

During the 1920s, the cartoonist Rube Goldberg became immensely popular churning out cartoons that depicted devices that performed simple tasks in impossibly indirect and convoluted ways.

In 1931, the Merriam-Webster dictionary even adopted the word “Rube Goldberg” as an adjective describing making something that should be simple incredibly complicated.

Welcome to Vermont’s fumbled efforts at drafting the rules for its mandatory GMO labeling law.