Acupuncture to improve fertility rates? 

The University of Maryland Center for Integrative Medicine says that acupuncture, when used as a complementary or adjuvant therapy for in vitro fertilization, may be beneficial  - depending on the baseline pregnancy rates of a fertility clinic. If the baseline success was not very high, it went up a little. For clinics with more success, acupuncture had no effect.

In vitro fertilization is a process that involves fertilizing a woman's egg with sperm outside the womb and then implanting the embryo in the woman's uterus. According to the researchers, acupuncture is the most commonly used adjuvant, complementary therapy among couples seeking treatment at fertility clinics in the United States.

There is a heated national debate about gun control.

Two mathematicians have designed parameters they say can help best prevent both one-on-one killings and mass shootings in the United States. Their findings, that properly-enforced gun laws will help, are not new. Like hockey, 'enforce the rules we already have' would seem to apply to guns. Instead, the cultural focus is on 'assault weapons', a tiny fraction of gun homicides, while ignoring the psychiatric common denominator and that the overwhelming number of gun deaths are suicides - not mass shootings.  Shooting sprees happen just as often in European countries where guns are banned as they happen in the US. 

X chromosomes are special, even for genetic material. They differ in number between men and women and to achieve equality between sexes, one out of two X chromosomes in women is silenced.

In Drosophila, the opposite happens: in male flies, the only available X chromosome is highly activated, to compensate for the absence of the second X-chromosome.

A "structure-based" approach to drug design has led to identification of compounds with the potential to delay or treat Alzheimer's disease, and possibly Parkinson's, Lou Gehrig's disease and other degenerative disorders.

Structure-based drug design, in which the physical structure of a targeted protein is used to help identify compounds that will interact with it, has already been used to generate therapeutic agents for a number of infectious and metabolic diseases. 

A new projection estimates that by the middle of this century there could be an average 56 percent drop in the amount of water stored in peak snowpack in the McKenzie River watershed of the Oregon Cascade Range -   if there is a 3.6 degree Fahrenheit temperature increase.

Similar impacts may be found on low-elevation maritime snow packs around the world.

40 years ago, a technique now used for detecting tiny quantities of molecules, in situations from crime scene forensic analysis, to drug detection, to establishing the origins of works of art, was discovered.

But despite there being a dozen CSI shows that use this on American television, you probably never heard of it. 

In the early 1970s, researchers discovered that by roughening the metal surface upon which the molecules they were examining had been placed, they could increase the signal by which they could detect these molecules - by a million times. It became arguably the most sensitive method of analysis on surfaces that anyone has ever come up with.

False memories implanted in mice show how easily it is to manipulate recall of events.

Natural killer cells (NK cells) are part of our innate immune system. As they first line of defense, researchers agree that the body needs as many active NK cells as possible.

But, as is often the case, there can be too much of a good thing and researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) have shown how.

In California, there are runaway wildfires because no one is allowed to take a machine into the woods and clear dead trees. Other countries have the opposite problem; a shortage of dead wood in forests results because fallen branches and trees are cleared away too often. 

Our one-size-fits-all federal management policy often hurts the environment under the guise of trying to help. Biologists working in Navarre note that dead wood ought to be decomposing, as it is the habitat of many living beings like lignicolous fungi. These fungi are capable of decomposing dead wood and turning it into organic and inorganic matter. Clearing away the dead wood from the forests is ecologically harmful for the fungi.

There aren't many areas where men and women benefit equally but coffee has always been about bringing people together. Do you think Newton would have done his great work without coffee? No, he would have starved long before Principia. The man ate every meal in a coffee house.

A new review in The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry will get heads nodding among coffee acolytes for finding that drinking lots of coffee daily reduces the risk of suicide in men and women by about 50%. The authors reviewed data from three U.S. studies and found that the risk of suicide for adults who drank two to four cups of caffeinated coffee per day was about half that of those who drank decaffeinated coffee or very little or no coffee.