Fast food giants are happy to promote healthy menus - they are in the revenue generation business, they will sell what people want to buy.

Yet food activists and government officials seem to lack basic insight into what kids want, whereas marketing will make whatever campaigns companies want - even if they know they won't work. But they are trying to make healthier food sound appealing, thus coming up with names like Fresh Apple Fries.

Even kids ages 3 to 7 have little interest in attempts at depicting healthier kids' meals, according to a new study by Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center in JAMA Pediatrics.  Or they are just confused at efforts to make apples equivalent to the food kids want when they go out.

There are recurring calls to make scientists more social. Scientists have already accepted government control of academic research and now fellow academics and some in the bureaucracy want to task them with communications and outreach also. A few even want to make their science outreach rather than their science output a factor in promotion and tenure.

Increasing heat is estimated to extend dry conditions to far more farmland and cities by the end of the century, according to a new paper.

Much of the concern about future drought under a global warming scenario has focused on rainfall projections but higher evaporation rates may also play an important role as warmer temperatures wring more moisture from the soil, even in some places where rainfall is forecasted to increase, say the authors, who use the latest computer simulations to model the effects of both changing rainfall and evaporation rates on future drought in the journal Climate Dynamics.

Do you live where your job is or do you move to be near people who match your personality as far as being agreeable or conscientious? 

California has three Democratic state senators under indictment, all being paid while due process makes its way. That seems very conscientious, though there is no chance that would be the case if the politicians facing jail time were Republicans. According to a new paper in Political Research Quarterly, state policies mirror the personalities of the public. If so, the personalities of Californians may veer toward being gun runners while they endorse bans on guns, and having $500 billion in debt while declaring their budget balanced.

It might seem that when lives are at stake, a little bit of pressure comes with the territory. Doctors who can't take pressure should be doing something besides medicine, like teaching at medical schools. 

A paper in Academic Medicine says there is a happy medium and that removing pressure from medical school while teaching students skills to manage stress and bounce back from adversity improves their mental health and boosts their academic achievement.

Stuart Slavin, M.D., M.Ed., associate dean for curriculum at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, is lead author of the paper which says depression among medical school students is significant, affecting between 20 and 30 percent of medical students in the U.S.

An experimental anticancer compound, one of a class of compounds known as PAK inhibitors, appears to have reversed behaviors associated with schizophrenia and restored some lost brain cell function in adolescent mice with a rodent version of the mental illness.

PAK inhibitors have been shown to confer some protection from brain damage due to Fragile X syndrome, an inherited disease in humans marked by mental retardation,  in animal experiments. There is also some evidence suggesting PAK inhibitors could be used to treat Alzheimer's disease. Because the PAK protein itself can initiate cancer and cell growth, PAK inhibitors have also been tested for cancer.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Making a snap decision usually means following your initial reaction -- going with your gut. That intuitive feeling sprouts from the limbic system, the evolutionarily older and simpler part of the brain that affects emotion, behavior and motivation.

But during adolescence, the limbic system connects and communicates with the rest of the brain differently than it does during adulthood, leaving many adolescents vulnerable to riskier behaviors, according to Duke University researchers.

DARIEN, IL – A new study of older men found a link between poor sleep quality and the development of cognitive decline over three to four years.

Results show that higher levels of fragmented sleep and lower sleep efficiency were associated with a 40 to 50 percent increase in the odds of clinically significant decline in executive function, which was similar in magnitude to the effect of a five-year increase in age. In contrast, sleep duration was not related to subsequent cognitive decline.

Consuming foods grown in urban gardens has become a big fad, and those foods might even offer health benefits, unless a lack of knowledge about the soil used for planting poses a health threat to both consumers and gardeners. 

A new paper the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF), researchers identifies a range of factors and challenges related to the perceived risk of soil contamination among urban community gardeners and found a need for clear and concise information on how best to prevent and manage soil contamination. 

DNA is the molecule that encodes the genetic instructions enabling a cell to produce the thousands of proteins it typically needs. The linear sequence of the A, T, C, and G bases in what is called coding DNA determines the particular protein that a short segment of DNA, known as a gene, will encode.

In many organisms, there is much more DNA in a cell than is needed to code for all the necessary proteins. This non-coding DNA was often referred to as "junk" DNA because it seemed unnecessary. But in retrospect, we did not yet understand the function of these seemingly unnecessary DNA sequences.