People with depression and anxiety are the heaviest smokers in the country but their doctors and mental health specialists don't ask them to quit due to concern that if they try to quit smoking their mental disorders will get worse. 

Between 40 to 80 percent of people with mental illness are daily smokers, depending on the disorder, compared to less than 20 percent of people who don't have problems with mental illness, according to research. The mentally ill also smoke more cigarettes per day -- often up to two packs. They have a disproportionately high rate of tobacco-related disease and mortality, such as cardiovascular disease or cancer, with a correspondingly heavy financial burden to the health-care system.

Old notion: Giant clouds of gas and dust to collapse inward due to gravity, growing denser and hotter until igniting nuclear fusion and forming stars.  New notion:  It's more than just gravity and cosmic magnetic fields play a more important role in star formation than previously thought.

A molecular cloud is a cloud of gas that acts as a stellar nursery.  When a molecular cloud collapses, only a small fraction of the cloud's material forms stars but scientists aren't sure why.

There is little doubt that, in modern times, scientific knowledge is at a peak from any other period in human history.  

However, there are also other factors that need to be considered.  50.3% of Americans believe in angels while 49.7 % believe in aliens.   

In another review, 55% claim angelic protection, 16% claim they've received a miraculous healing, 8% say they pray in tongues, and one-fifth claim God speaks with them.

Researchers at the University of Leicester and Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology in Portugal say a new discovery about the protective properties of vitamin C in cells from the human skin could lead to better skin regeneration.

The work in the journal Free Radical Biology and Medicine by Tiago Duarte, Marcus S. Cooke and G. Don Jones found that a form of Vitamin C helped to promote wound healing and also helped protect the DNA damage of skin cells.

Identifying a face can be difficult when it is shown for only a fraction of a second but young adults have a distinct advantage over elderly people in those conditions, say researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Neuroscience, who found indications that elderly people have reduced perception speed.

I ran into an interesting linguistic stumbling block.  I'll call it the "It's science, so it must be hard" frame of mind.  I wrote to some friends and family about this project, saying:

I'm launching a satellite for fun, to make music from space.  It's called Project Calliope, and I'm writing about it up at: http://scientificblogging.com/satellite_diaries/feed
 
It's pretty much just me, with some friends helping with different parts of it, and a couple of sponsors helping cover costs (hopefully). I'll be the first to admit it's unusual, but I've always wanted to be part of the space race.

And I received one particular reply of:

We have been in an anomalously long Solar Minimum.  The sun has an 11 year cycle from Minimum to Maximum.  But the cycles are (like most things in nature) not exact, and some are longer than the others.  We are coming out of Solar Minimum... or are we?

Even in the midst of our current cycle, solar physicists were predicting a long minimum, and, humorously, seemed evenly divided over whether this meant we would have a more active Maximum, or a far less active Maximum.  For example, David Hathaway in the NASA article "Solar Cycle 25 peaking around 2022 could be one of the weakest in centuries" clearly predicts the latter.
 

Arbor energy?   No, they're not smoking plants, they're powering circuits with them.   It turns out that there is electricity in trees, in small but measurable quantities, and it's enough for University of Washington researchers to run an electronic circuit.

A study last year from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that plants generate a voltage of up to 200 millivolts when one electrode is placed in a plant and the other in the surrounding soil. Those researchers have since started a company developing forest sensors that exploit this new power source.

What does peer review do for science and what does the scientific community want it to do?  Should peer review detect fraud and misconduct? Does peer review illuminate good ideas or shut them down? Should reviewers be anonymous?

The Peer Review Survey 2009, a large international poll of authors and reviewers, released its preliminary findings today.

Peer review is considered fundamental to integration of new research findings and it allows other researchers to analyze findings and society at large to weigh up research claims. It results in 1.3 million² articles published every year and it has been growing rapidly with the expansion of the global research community - and corporate publishers.

About 10% of couples who want a baby have fertility problems and causes offered tend to break down around advocacy issues; environmentalists blame pollution while psychiatrists point to our stressful lifestyles, but evolutionary biologist Dr. Oren Hasson of Tel Aviv University's Department of Zoology has a different take than the others, though also based on his speciality.

The reproductive organs of men and women are currently involved in an evolutionary arms race, he says in a new study, and the fight isn't over yet.