Parents of children with neurological conditions and disorders and mental health issues are often faced with the frightening and difficult decision of whether to medicate for specific issues and behaviors. Parents are already stressed, worried, and expecting the worst when they walk into a psychiatrist's office, and it doesn't help when they've already been through the gamut of pediatricians, psychologists and other health professionals who have an opinion on the diagnosis of mental health issues in children and the role medication should play in the treatment.

Around 100,000 years ago, human evolution was in a rut, modern human ancestors consisted of 5-10,000 individuals living in Africa.

Yet modern humans somehow emerged from this population bottleneck, expanding dramatically in both number and range, and replacing all other co-existing evolutionary cousins, like Neanderthals. What caused this bottleneck in the first place?  Answers range from gene mutations to cultural developments like language to climate-altering events, like a massive volcanic eruption. 

Maybe there is another possible factor: infectious disease.

The LHC collider has been producing proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV for two months now, and the integrated luminosity collected by the CMS experiment has surpassed the mark of 4 inverse femtobarns (see figure below). That's already about 80% of the total bounty of 2011!

This is not a story of Lost Tribes, but of lost history--the discovery of "Jewish genes" in Hispano Christian populations of the American Southwest. Jon Entine, author of Abraham's Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chose People, reports.

“Let us remember all of our Jewish brothers and sisters, who through their faithfulness to One God, inspired all Christians.”

Researchers announced the discovery of Afrasia djijidae, a new early anthropoid fossil.

The 37-million-year-old Afrasia djijidae resembles another early anthropoid, Afrotarsius libycus, recently discovered at a site of similar age in the Sahara Desert of Libya. That close similarity between Afrasia and Afrotarsius indicates that early anthropoids colonized Africa only shortly before the time when these animals lived. The colonization of Africa by early anthropoids was a pivotal step in primate and human evolution, because it set the stage for the later evolution of more advanced apes and humans there. 

There was a time when giant insects ruled the skies and it corresponded to high oxygen levels.

After the evolution of birds, about 150 million years ago, insects got smaller - despite rising oxygen levels.  What gives?

Insects reached their biggest sizes about 300 million years ago during the late Carboniferous and early Permian periods. This was the reign of the predatory griffinflies, giant dragonfly-like insects with wingspans of up to 28 inches - creepy. The leading theory attributed their large size to high oxygen concentrations in the atmosphere (over 30 percent, compared to 21 percent today), which allowed giant insects to get enough oxygen through the tiny breathing tubes that insects use instead of lungs. 

Dear squid blog, I am sorry that so many other projects have been keeping me from you lately! My love for squid remains undimmed. Just to prove it, I will share with the world a helpful chart that I drew several years ago and recently unearthed.

The Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas) and the purpleback flying squid (Sthenoteuthis oualaniensis) can look very similar. If you're fishing in a location where only one of them lives (like Indonesia for Sthenoteuthis or California for Dosidicus), no problem. But in certain areas of the Pacific Ocean--oh look I have a map--their ranges overlap, so there is confusion. Panic. Mayhem. Which squid is it?

Michael Richmond of  Rochester Institute of Technology created a simple example for how to determine the astronomical unit - the distance from Earth to the Sun and therefore the basis for all modern measurements in space  for the CLEA workshop in 2004, the last time we had a transit of Venus - and it won't happen again in our lifetimes so tomorrow is the last chance to see it.

For the second and last time this century, the planet Venus will pass over the visible disk of our Sun for observers located in the Americas (in the evening of June 5th) and western Europe (in the morning of June 6th). The event has a noteworthy scientific value -particularly for exoplanetary searches-, but it is also quite spectacular to observe, if you have some modest equipment (but you should be able to spot it with your naked eye, provided you only look through a thick-smoked glass; never look at the Sun directly!). The added value is that probably none of us will be around the next time this event occurs, in 2117.

A new durable, environmentally-benign (we all hope) blue pigment has also been found to have unusual characteristics in reflecting heat - it's much better at it than most blue pigments in use.  The compound just received patent approval and was discovered by Oregon State University scientists who were instead studying some materials for their electrical properties.