In California it may be the summer of fires as smoke fills the air, but at Yale researchers pump smoke into the lungs of mice in order to help find an explanation behind reactions in smokers due viral infections.

Recent studies by researchers at Yale found that people who smoke have a worse reaction to viral infections not due to a weakened immune system, but because of an overreaction.

If the drinker paradox states that in any pub there is a customer such that, if he or she drinks, everybody in the pub drinks and the diamond-water paradox states that water is more useful than diamonds, yet is a lot cheaper , then the French paradox that the French suffer a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease despite a diet relatively rich in saturated fats, must certainly be true.

The French paradox became popular on an episode of 60 minutes in 1991 with the incorporation of research supporting, red wine as the reason for the decrease in heart disease. Shortly after the show aired wine sales went up 44 percent.

Since people have asked, here is my take on Stuart Kauffman’s ideas on reductionism and emergence. Kauffman distinguishes between two types of emergence, “epistemological” and “ontological.”

Epistemological emergence is the idea that complex systems cannot be described, as a matter of practice, in terms of their component units because of our epistemic limitations, that is our inability to do the computations. According to ontological emergence, on the other hand, a full understanding of complex systems in terms of their components is not possible in principle, not just because of practical considerations, because new levels of causality appear at higher levels of organization.

According to Peter Olson of the Natural History Museum in London, "All free-living organisms host one or more parasites." This can be taken two ways, both of them generally true: a) that each individual multicellular organism hosts at least one individual parasite within its body, and b) that each free-living species plays host to at least one species of parasite that attacks it exclusively. Consider this second point for a moment. For each free living species there is one or more (usually several more) parasite species -- that is, as a category (polyphyletic, obviously), parasites may very well be the most diverse types of organisms on the planet.

Surcharges. those annoying fees like shipping and handling, have been around since the advent of catalogs and remain in the days of the Internet. Everyone hates them but how many of us base our purchasing decision on these bothersome fees?

Quite a lot, it seems. And not just on Ebay, where sellers make a habit of tacking on outrageous handling charges, but in all aspects of commerce. Basically, the less trustworthy the seller, the more inclined a buyer will balk at surcharges.

The new research published in The Journal of Consumer Research was conducted by Amar Cheema, Ph.D., assistant professor of marketing at Washington University in St. Louis, and he suggests that consumers pay more attention to surcharges overall than previously thought.

Somewhere, people got the idea that girls were not as good at math as boys and that was a cultural issue - discrimination on one side or favoritism on the other - and it had to be fixed, usually with legislation and money for social activists.

Is there any truth to it?

After sifting through mountains of data, including SAT results and math scores from 7 million students who were tested in accordance with the No Child Left Behind Act, a team of scientists reporting in Science says the answer is 'no.' Whether they looked at average performance, the scores of the most gifted children or students' ability to solve complex math problems, girls measured up to boys.

CD4+ T lymphocytes, or simply CD4 T cells, are the "brains" of the immune system, coordinating its activity when the body comes under attack. They are also the cells that are attacked by HIV, the devastating virus that causes AIDS and has infected roughly 40 million people worldwide. The virus slowly eats away at CD4 T cells, weakening the immune system.

But the immune systems of HIV/AIDS patients face another enemy as well — stress, which can accelerate CD4 T cell declines. Now, researchers at UCLA report that the practice of mindfulness meditation stopped the decline of CD4 T cells in HIV-positive patients suffering from stress, slowing the progression of the disease. The study was just published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, astronomers were able to witness for the first time the appearance of a shell of dusty gas around a star that had just erupted and follow its evolution for more than 100 days. This provided the astronomers with a new way to estimate the distance of this object and obtain invaluable information on the operating mode of stellar vampires, dense stars that suck material from a companion.

Although novae were first thought to be new stars appearing in the sky, hence their Latin name, they are now understood as signaling the brightening of a small, dense star. Novae occur in double star systems comprising a white dwarf - the end product of a solar-like star - and, generally, a low-mass normal star - a red dwarf. The two stars are so close together that the red dwarf cannot hold itself together and loses mass to its companion. Occasionally, the shell of matter that has fallen onto the ingesting star becomes unstable, leading to a thermonuclear explosion which makes the system brighter.

Themis was the blindfolded Greek goddess of order and justice. It's also a NASA-funded mission which stands for Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms - and, using it, UCLA space scientists and colleagues have identified the mechanism that triggers substorms in space; wreaks havoc on satellites, power grids and communications systems; and leads to the explosive release of energy that causes the spectacular brightening of the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights.

For 30 years, there have been two competing theories to explain the onset of these substorms, which are energy releases in the Earth's magnetosphere, said Vassilis Angelopoulos, a UCLA professor of Earth and space sciences and principal investigator of THEMIS.

A new discovery contradicts the prevailing theory that aging is a buildup of tissue damage akin to rust in some metals, and implies science might eventually halt or even reverse the ravages of age.

Specific genetic instructions drive aging in worms, report researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The researchers examined the regulation of aging in C. elegans, a millimeter-long nematode worm whose simple body and small number of genes make it a useful tool for biologists. The worms age rapidly: their maximum life span is about two weeks.