One day, it might be possible to detect the spread of life among the stars through panspermia--a hypothetical process of life distributed throughout the Milky Way by asteroids, comets, and even spacecraft. Henry Lin and Abraham Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics propose, “If future surveys detect biosignatures in the atmospheres of exoplanets,” it ought to be possible to detect the spread of life between stars even without knowing how life spread from host star to host star. That is, we probably wouldn’t be able to detect the mechanisms of panspermia such as asteroid, spacecraft, or what have you.

My husband is used to hearing snark about being a lobbyist. As the owner of a lobbying firm in Chicago, he takes most derogatory comments about his profession in stride. So imagine my surprise when he became outraged reading aloud a boilerplate description of Washington lobbyists in our daughter’s new high school textbook:

In reality, many lobbyists in Washington are ‘fixers’ who offer to influence government policies for a price. Their personal connections help to open doors to allow their paying clients to ‘just get a chance to talk’ with top officials.

There was more to get his Irish up:

A man goes into a butcher shop to buy some steak.

Man: "How much is your steak?"
Butcher: "$4.99 a pound."
Man:       "That's ridiculous! The butcher across town sells steak for $3.99 a pound!"
Butcher: "Then buy it from him."
Man:       "I tried, but he's all out."
Butcher:  "Well, when I'm out, I'll sell it for $1.99 per pound!"

Pretty good joke, but even better when it's applied to what's going on now with generic drug prices. That is, assuming you can figure it out.

But, one thing is clear: They are going up, and really fast.

Vitamin D is being blamed for or is linked to curing everything in 2015, and so it is little surprise a paper uses a genetic study to bolster observational evidence that lower vitamin D levels are associated with increased risk of multiple sclerosis.

Researchers have unraveled the mystery cause of the emerging wheat disease White Grain Disorder, by isolating three previously undiscovered fungi from infected wheat samples and sequenced their genomes.

Australian wheat exports are worth more than $6 billion a year with diseases costing the industry around $1 billion a year. White Grain Disorder emerged about 20 years ago and has sporadically affected crops in Southern Queensland and South Australia, but until now has been poorly understood.

One of the important things in life is to have a job you enjoy and which is a motivation for waking up in the morning. I can say I am lucky enough to be in that situation. Besides providing me with endless entertainment through the large dataset I enjoy analyzing, and the constant challenge to find new ways and ideas to extract more information from data, my job also gives me the opportunity to gamble - and win money, occasionally.

The dominant antibody type present in the blood of transplant recipients may indicate their likelihood of experiencing organ rejection, according to a study which may help doctors identify patients who need aggressive treatments to safeguard the health of their new organ.

Transplant recipients who receive a kidney, heart, or lung often develop an immune response to the foreign tissue in the form of antibodies referred as donor-specific HLA antibodies. Some patients may already have these antibodies before their transplant because they have been exposed to blood products or previous transplants. Although the presence of donor-specific HLA antibodies in a recipient is usually not a good sign, not all patients who have them experience a poor outcome.

Women are more likely than men to initiate divorces, but not to end non-marital relationships, according to Michael Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at Stanford University.

Rosenfeld's analysis relies on survey data from the 2009-2015 waves of the nationally representative How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey. He considers 2,262 adults, ages 19 to 94, who had opposite sex partners in 2009. By 2015, 371 of these people had broken up or gotten divorced. 

Not only does organic food have pesticides, which the $100 billion Big Organic industry would rather you forget, but it even has synthetic pesticides.

And that "Non-GMO Project" project sticker won't save you, because some boxes of Kashi GoLean Original cereal may have been "verified" by that piece of paper also, yet the food still had glyphosate, according to an analysis by another activist group. 

As the use of e-cigarettes has risen dramatically in the United States in recent years, so have calls to poison centers about them, yet most parents are unaware of potential dangers.

The devices are used like cigarettes but instead of tobacco, they vaporize a liquid mixture of nicotine, glycerin and glycol ethers. If ingested, a teaspoon of this "e-liquid" can be lethal to a child, and smaller amounts can cause nausea and vomiting that may necessitate a trip to the  emergency room. In a few cases, exposure to skin has also sickened children.