There is no question that in recent decades academics have veered sharply left, and none more so than the humanities fields - but linking government spending to male body image may have set a new standard. Whereas the academic left used to attack the right, now they attack the left that won't continue to raise taxes - neoliberals.

Lie on the beach this summer and your body will be bombarded by about sextillion photons of light per second.

Most of these photons, or small packets of energy, originate from the Sun but a very small fraction have travelled across the Universe for billions of years before ending their existence when they collide with your skin.

In a new study to be published in the Astrophysical Journal on August 12th, astronomers have accurately measured the light hitting the Earth from outside our galaxy over a very broad wavelength range.

Female domestic cats adjust their response to kitten calls depending on how urgent they sound, according to a study published in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology. Independent of their own experience of raising kittens, female cats distinguish between kitten calls that convey different levels of urgency and react accordingly, researchers at Hannover Medical School and the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Germany have found. Male cats do not adjust their response in similar ways.

Black children and young adults are about half as likely as their white counterparts to get mental health care despite having similar rates of mental health problems, according to a study published today [Friday, Aug. 12] in the International Journal of Health Services. Hispanic youth also get only half as much mental health care as whites.

The study used data on children under 18 and young adults 18-34 from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey covering all 50 states for the years 2006-2012. It found that minorities received much less of virtually all types of mental health care, including visits to psychiatrists, social workers and psychologists, as well as substance abuse counseling and mental health counseling by pediatricians and other doctors.

In Canada, health care is paid for by taxpayers, but it doesn't reduce expensive emergency room visits by people with disabilities - a key argument the Obama administration claimed in passing the Affordable Care Act.

But it's a small study published in the journal Canadian Family Physician - the larger study is being done in the U.S., where Obamacare premiums are going up another 18-23 percent. None of the savings have been realized yet, nor are insurers making more money from premiums. Instead, people who had insurance kept it if they could, and now pay higher premiums so that people who didn't want insurance could get it in case they need it 20 years from now.

A new study correlates Finland's national tobacco policies - less smoking, more snus, for those addicted to nicotine - seem to be radically reducing the incidence of subarachnoid hemorrhage, the most fatal form of stroke.

Previously it was thought that in Finland approximately a thousand people suffer subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) every year - most of them adults of working age. Up to half of those afflicted die within a year. Subarachnoid hemorrhage is typically caused by a ruptured cerebral aneurysm, which leads to a sudden increase in the intracranial pressure. Smoking is a key risk factor for SAH and lots of other diseases, whereas nicotine, the addictive component, is not. 

Atmospheric scientists overwhelmingly deny the existence of a secret, elite-driven plot to release harmful chemicals into the air from high-flying aircraft, according to the first peer-reviewed journal paper to address the "chemtrails" conspiracy theory.

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine, the Carnegie Institution for Science and the nonprofit Near Zero organization asked 77 atmospheric chemists and geochemists if they had come across evidence of such a large-scale spraying program, and 76 responded that they had not. The survey results were published Wednesday in Environmental Research Letters.

Plant scientists at the University of Cambridge have found that the cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) alters gene expression in the tomato plants it infects, causing changes to air-borne chemicals - the scent - emitted by the plants. Bees can smell these subtle changes, and glasshouse experiments have shown that bumblebees prefer infected plants over healthy ones.

Scientists say that by indirectly manipulating bee behaviour to improve pollination of infected plants by changing their scent, the virus is effectively paying its host back. This may also benefit the virus: helping to spread the pollen of plants susceptible to infection and, in doing so, inhibiting the chance of virus-resistant plant strains emerging.

Researchers at Technical University of Munich discovered that our brain actively takes sugar from the blood. Prior to this, researchers around the world had assumed that this was a purely passive process. An international team led by diabetes expert Matthias Tschöp reported in the journal 'Cell' that transportation of sugar into the brain is regulated by so-called glia cells that react to hormones such as insulin or leptin; previously it was thought that this was only possible for neurons.

You shouldn't believe everything you read. The CDC insists salt is a problem, and the FDA asked for voluntary warning labels after the sue-and-settle lawyer group Center for Science in the Public Interest kept harassing them. Yet the evidence shows salt in a normal diet is no problem. And no quote on Facebook that has a picture of Einstein included is any more accurate. The US government promotes a prediabetes designation that has the rest of the world scratching their heads.

Even textbooks are often wrong. That is the problem with voting on science.