In the war for attention, a lot of parents are made to feel like they are not very good if they don't get their child into the right pre-school, buy the right food which lacks the additives it's fashionable to exclude, or spent Quality Time shuffling them from sporting events to music classes to book readings.

You can relax. You may not be perfect, but you are still probably a better dad than your dad was, finds an analysis of survey results published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which operates under the auspices of the U.N. World Health Organisation, is soliciting comments prior to holding an Advisory Group meeting in November to propose revisions to its Preamble.

If you added Vitamin C to Pepsi, you know what you would have? Orange juice. 

There is nothing wrong with orange juice (public relations manufactured health halo aside), just like there is nothing wrong with Pepsi, they should both be treats. Unfortunately, for the U.S., the richest country in the world, no food need ever be a treat, they can all be purchased every day. And that is bad for kids. 

If a study has 229 trials and there are only 12 false positives, that is a good result. 

For thousands of years, trepanation--the act of scraping, cutting, or drilling an opening into the cranium--was practiced around the world, primarily to treat head trauma but also for headaches, seizures and mental illnesses. Sometimes it was even done to expel demons.

It sounds garish now, but ancient Peruvians were surprisingly adept at it, so adept that Incan "neurosurgeons" had twice the survival rate for the procedure than better equipped surgeons during the American Civil War centuries later.

Obviously there could be differences in when it was done, so it may be due to confounders that in Incan times the mortality rate was between 17 and 25 percent while during the Civil War it was between 46 and 56 percent. 

Simulation, noun:
1. Imitation or enactment
2. The act or process of pretending; feigning.
3. An assumption or imitation of a particular appearance or form; counterfeit; sham.

Well, high-energy physics is all about simulations. 

We have a theoretical model that predicts the outcome of the very energetic particle collisions we create in the core of our giant detectors, but we only have approximate descriptions of the inputs to the theoretical model, so we need simulations. 

Suicides have gone up in the United States since 1999, according to the CDC, but then state it is more than a mental health issue.

There is no rhyme or reason to the increases, half of states, from cultures as different as Vermont and North Dakota, saw large changes of over 30 percent.  Suicide is the 10th-leading cause of death in the U.S., and rates have been climbing steadily for years. With 44,965 suicide deaths in 2016, half of them using a firearm, the CDC would like to know why.

One way to manage chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) is to abandon existing guidelines and screen all people born between 1945 and 1975 for the disease, according to a new paper. 

Chronic HCV is a major public health problem in Canada with serious health effects leading to premature death. In 2013, about 252,000 Canadians were infected with HCV. People born between 1945 and 1975 have the highest rates of HCV, although an estimated 70% of this group have not been tested. 

On Saturday, June 2nd, 2018, I gave the commencement speech for the North Penn-Liberty class of 2018, 35 years after I graduated. While much has changed, the basic challenges young people will face have not. A number of attendees asked me for a copy and I didn't have a clean one, mine was half-typed, half hand notes, so it is presented below. At least as it was written. I went off book in a few spots, including at the end. So even at my age I have new things to learn: Like always listen to the experienced speechwriters.

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Short summary: This is a first paper in what they hope to be a long term study. It’s an interesting project, but it should not be used to predict what will happen to Earth in the future. Instead we should rely on projections by the scientists who are studying the effects of climate change, our population growth, predicting food security and looking at the intricate details of how our world works. The UN population division says as its middle of range projection that we level off at 11 billion people by 2100 and experts say we can feed everyone too, if we continue on target with the things we are doing to make sure it happens.