I have set out to write about "Naturality" for this column three times since the beginning of 2012 and each time I have abandoned the article.  It's a complex topic that easily gets away from me.  I have been measuring Naturality in search engine results for several years now.  Some years ago I devised a simple formula to help me explain Naturality to people:

The fair trade movement  is in its seventh decade but has an internal problem.  Fair trade, as a concept, sought originally to make sure small people got a fair deal - a Mennonite visiting Puerto Rico saw the poverty levels of people there and decided to help them make more money, rather than advocating to give them government handouts (I know, I know, zany religious types).  

Conservatives give more money to charity, studies show. This makes some sense; liberals believe in sharing wealth already and advocate policies reflecting that while conservatives advocate smaller government and greater individual initiative.

But why do people in those political groups give to one cause over another? According to a new analysis in the International Journal of Research in Marketing: Special Issue on Consumer Identities, the values of their political affiliation are more important than the charity itself.

The word 'lunacy' is derived from the longheld belief that people act a little crazier during a full moon.  We know the moon - Luna - effects us, its gravitational pull creates ocean tides and many ancient cultures thought it could also affect our health or state of mind.

While there is no link between the moon and human lunacy, spacecraft and computer simulations reveal that the moon does indeed have the cosmic kind; a far-reaching, invisible influence on the solar wind.

Oppressed people under attack in the War Against Smokers may have a new defender - science. 

A specific antioxidant supplement containing N-Acetylcysteine, or NAC may be an effective therapy for some features of autism, according to a pilot trial from the Stanford University School of Medicine and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital that involved 31 children with the disorder.

You've read a lot about 'invisibility' over the last few years.  Mathematicians and scientists have been working on various devices that enable invisibility cloaks which shield small objects from detection by microwaves or sound waves.

Stem cell research is very dynamic with research trends, focus, and approaches evolving rapidly - but increased government restrictions on the private sector have led to a steep decline in venture capital, which threatens to slow the pace of research and development. 

New analysis from Frost&Sullivan, 'Strategic Analysis of the European Stem Cell Research Tools Market', finds that the market earned revenues of $148.4 million in 2011 and estimates this could reach $322 million in 2017. The segments covered include: bio-imaging and microscopy, cell biology tools, immunochemical, molecular biology tools, and protein biochemistry tools.

'The cloud' is so cliché Microsoft even has housewives using it in commercials.  All it basically means is that you can have a new way for your data to be hacked and stolen.  Unless the company storing it goes out of business and you made no backups.  Plus, that's not really a cloud, it's stored in a solid medium, it just happens to be outside your house.

But true cloud storage is on the horizon. 

Light signals have been stored as patterns in a room-temperature atomic vapor by scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute. They stored two letters of the alphabet in a cell filled with rubidium (Rb) atoms.