Can you predict how sensitive your sense of taste is by sticking your tongue out and counting the bumps?

A long-standing hypothesis says this is so. But a little crowdsourcing of science - what used to be called doing a study - disproved that idea that "supertasters" owe their special sensitivity to bitter tastes to an usually high density of taste buds on their tongue, according to a paper in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience.

Older people who undertake at least 25 minutes of moderate or vigorous exercise everyday need fewer prescriptions and are less likely to be admitted to hospital in an emergency, new research has revealed.

The findings, published in the journal PLOS ONE, reinforce the need for exercise programmes to help older people stay active. It could also reduce reliance on NHS services and potentially lead to cost savings.

In the first study of its kind looking at this age group, researchers from the University of Bristol looked at data from 213 people whose average age was 78.

A retrospective study used large population-based data to compare the risk of hospitalization for six common chemotherapy regimens.  The work gives in the Journal of Clinical Oncology gives oncologists a new understanding of the toxicity levels of specific chemotherapy regimens used for women with early stage breast cancer, according to the authors from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. 

 There have been several prior publications in the health services research field addressing chemotherapy toxicity using claims data, but they don't outline specific chemotherapy regimens. 

If you visit the best noodle houses in Asia, they will happily tell you their secret: The amino acid glutamate, boiled from dried seaweed or fermented soy, or gotten from a can, where it has been stabilized with salt and given the name monosodium glutamate (MSG). 

MSG is safe but some epidemiological and animal model studies have linked it to obesity and disorders associated with metabolic syndrome, including progressive liver disease. Other studies have disputed that.

The slopes of a giant Martian volcano nearly twice as tall as Mount Everest, called Arsia Mons, were once covered in glacial ice and they may have been home to one of the most recent habitable environments yet found on the Red Planet, according to new research.

Arsia Mons is the third tallest volcano on Mars and one of the largest mountains in the solar system. The new analysis of the landforms surrounding Arsia Mons shows that eruptions along the volcano's northwest flank happened at the same time that a glacier covered the region around 210 million years ago. The heat from those eruptions would have melted massive amounts of ice to form englacial lakes — bodies of water that form within glaciers like liquid bubbles in a half-frozen ice cube.

The United States contributes almost $10 billion a year from Medicare into funding the Graduate medical education (GME) system but it fails to provide the workforce needed for the 21st century and lacks the necessary transparency and accountability.

Instead, it is more like political cronyism. New York, for example, gets 20% of the total while 29 other states, including places with a severe shortage of physicians with far more seniors and poor patients, get less than 1 percent.

Boulder, Colo., USA – Impact craters reveal one of the most spectacular geologic process known to man. During the past 3.5 billion years, it is estimated that more than 80 bodies, larger than the dinosaur-killing asteroid that struck the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, have bombarded Earth. However, tectonic processes, weathering, and burial quickly obscure or destroy craters. For example, if Earth weren't so dynamic, its surface would be heavily cratered like the Moon or Mercury.

Using your brain – particularly during adolescence – may help brain cells survive and could impact how it functions after puberty.

According to a recently published study in Frontiers in Neuroscience, Rutgers University behavioral neuroscientist Tracey Shors, who co-authored the study, found that the newborn brain cells in young rats that were successful at learning survived while the same brain cells in animals that didn't master the task died quickly.

Lighter-colored butterflies and dragonflies do better in warmer areas of Europe, a finding that could have implicated for global warming; darker insects could face a competitive disadvantage, finds a study recently published in Nature Communications.

Light-colored insects dominate the warmer south of Europe and darker insects dominate the cooler north. For dragonflies, the insect assemblage in Europe has on average gotten lighter during the last decades, which the authors attribute to climate change.

Defensive medicine, to prevent malpractice claims, are far higher costs than medical personnel, but the United States shift to government health care is going to add a third component. Tests will be free and people will demand them.

Dr. Alai Tan, a senior biostatistician in the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston   Sealy Center on Aging and lead author of a new study has concluded that providing better access to health care may lead to the overuse of mammograms for women who regularly see a primary care physician and who have a limited life expectancy.

Screening women in this category could subject them "to greater risks of physical, emotional and economic suffering" but it could happen anyway.