Though the central coast of California is some of the best farmland in the world, organic farmers who don't want to use modern science have a difficult time producing crops for their $35 billion and growing in corporate customers.

Yet science can help there also. Cover crops can provide weed and erosion control so scientifically determining the best method for establishing a uniform and dense cover crop stand as soon as possible after planting is a critical first step.

A child's illness and hospitalization is stressful for children and their parents and also clinicians. 

20 years ago, the Four Habits Model of Highly Effective Clinicians, a core set of communication skills developed to help physicians communicate with patients, was co-created by Regenstrief Institute sociologist Richard Frankel, Ph.D. A new study reports that the Four Habits Model can successfully prepare inexperienced nurses for emotionally difficult conversations with parents of pediatric patients. 

If you own an electric car, you spend a lot of time thinking about where you will recharge it - and how long it will take. In Silicon Valley, where electric cars are the newest fad, charge rage is leading to lost productivity due to hostile emails about someone being hooked up to a parking lot charger for too long. Being stuck on 880 is bad enough without being stranded too.

Chemists say they have synthesized a new material that could show the way forward to lithium-sulfur batteries and that could mean actually driving somewhere meaningful.

When it comes to urine, it's all relative. We can't prove Sir Isaac Newton was thinking about how animals urinate when he was developing his laws of gravity but he can't prove he wasn't either. What we can prove is that they are connected – by the urethra, to be specific.

A new study investigated how quickly 32 animals urinate. It turns out that it's all about the same. Even though an elephant's bladder is 3,600 times larger than a cat's (18 liters vs. 5 milliliters), both animals relieve themselves in about 20 seconds. In fact, all animals that weigh more than 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds) urinate in that same time span.

Jill Abramson was recently ousted from her position as the executive editor of The New York Times. Her defenders said it was because of her gender (yet she got the job) and her demand for more compensation (she was paid more than her predecessor and the New York Times is hemorrhaging money) while critics called her polarizing and brusque. Some used the term 'pushy' which was codespeak for sexism, it was said.

She was not the first difficult person to end up running a newsroom and the response her firing got from subordinates and other media leaders likely surprised her - difficult people never know they are difficult, according to a new paper from the Columbia Business School .

In previous articles I’ve demonstrated how to use littleBits and erector set parts to build a magnetic stirrer and a sample rotator. Since I was able to drive Erector set machines with the littleBits motor I decided to try to use it to drive K’nex contraptions.

Recently findings could help to reduce health care charges while also protecting childhood cancer survivors from heart ailments caused by drug therapy. 

The paper reviewed data from patient histories to show that current standard medical guidelines for protecting childhood cancer survivors from drug treatment-related heart disease and heart failure later in life through periodic heart scans (echocardiographs) are overly cautious.

According to the data, the frequency of such post-cancer screenings can be safely reduced for low-risk patients – with large cost-savings and little reduction in overall quality of patient care.

The Jacobi iterative method, a 169-year-old math strategy, may soon get a new lease on life.

In a recent study, researchers at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center used video observation to assess 
anesthesia provider
hand hygiene compliance.

They observed an average of 149 hand hygiene opportunities per hour of anesthesia time. Hand hygiene compliance was lowest during the first and last 20-minute time periods. The low hand hygiene compliance rates at case start and case end corresponded with sharp peaks in bacterial contamination of the 20 most frequently touched objects during these same time periods. 

It's unclear why there is a natural medicine craze in the modern era. Real medicine was invented because natural medicine didn't help people. If natural medicine survived double-blind clinical trials, it became regular medicine.