While you are reading this article, you could be getting a little smarter, but you could also be losing important information.

An idle brain is still doing important work and in the age of constant information overload, it’s a good idea to go offline on a regular basis, says Erik Fransén, a researcher from Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Telomerase is an enzyme that is the hallmark of both aging and the uncontrolled cell division associated with cancer and in an effort to understand and control telomerase activity, researchers at The Wistar Institute have discovered a protein "motif," named TFLY, which is crucial to the function of telomerase.

Altering this motif disrupts telomerase function, they found, a fact that they believe will help them in their efforts to identify inhibitors of telomerase with potential cancer therapeutic properties. 

Calcium helps strengthen bones in people but it is also a critical nutrient for healthy tree growth and new research shows that adding it to the soil helps reverse the decades-long decline of forests ailing from the effects of acid rain. 

A year ago I noted an alarming increase in celiac disease patients - it seemed to be afflicting a lot of rich, white, American women.

Outrage and scorn were delivered to my door; dozens of comments vilified me for saying it was not a real disease - which would have been fine, had I actually said that. Yet dwarfing those comments by hundreds were the anecdotal claims of people who had self-diagnosed themselves as celiac, at least until they discovered that since it was an actual life-threatening disease, they couldn't claim they had it, so they had reverted to being gluten sensitive, or even intolerant - vague and non-descriptive and requiring no pesky diagnosis.

Europeans may be slightly less anti-science than they are portrayed - at least when it comes to food.

Though American activists want the USA to be more like Europe and ban GMOs (except, oddly, in the food that organic meat ate), that is either not a policy that actual European consumers wanted, or they have become more educated since those laws were passed, or surveys lack controls too much to be worthwhile.

How to present in a simple way the spinorial space-time and the privileged space direction it generates? What is the fundamental difference between space-time spinors and the conventional description of space and time? What is the relevance for the analysis of WMAP and Planck data ?

Predicting the behavior of a sunspot cycle is fairly reliable once the cycle is well underway (about 3 years after the minimum in sunspot number occurs(1). Prior to that time the predictions are less reliable but planning for satellite orbits and space missions often require knowledge of solar activity levels years in advance.

A number of techniques are used to predict the amplitude of a cycle during the time near and before sunspot minimum. Relationships have been found between the size of the next cycle maximum and the length of the previous cycle, the level of activity at sunspot minimum, and the size of the previous cycle.

A multi-center study has determined that wearing back braces would prevent the need for spinal correction surgery in children with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) - early results were overwhelmingly in favor of bracing.

Extreme weather event coverage may lead people to think more seriously about climate change, according to new surveys of New Jersey college students which found that shortly after Hurricane Irene and "Super Storm" Sandy, they were more likely to show support for a politician running on a "green" platform and expressed a greater belief that climate change is caused by human activity.

6,000 light-years away, in the constellation of Scorpius, nebula IC 4628 is a huge region filled with gas and clumps of dark dust which produces brilliant hot young stars. In visible light, these stars appear as a blue-white color, but they also emit intense radiation in other parts of the spectrum — most notably in the ultraviolet.