In the 1980s, student loans were not unlimited, there was a cap on how much you could borrow without getting a regular loan from a bank. As a result, colleges and universities kept their costs down.

By the end of the decade, politicians saw a chart showing that people with a college degree made more money than people with a high school diploma. So the obvious solution for politicians was to give students unlimited student loans and secure loyal voters. It certainly worked. Universities now had unlimited funding and in thanks academic representation lurched wildly toward the party that made the political manna from heaven possible.

Taking vitamin D supplements could slow or even reverse the progression of less aggressive, or low-grade, prostate tumors without the need for surgery or radiation, a scientist will report today.

His team will describe the approach in one of nearly 11,000 presentations at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society. The meeting is being held here through Thursday.

The first phase 1 trial of an Ebola vaccine based on the current (2014) strain have shown it to be safe and provoke an immune response.  The big question, whether it can protect against the Ebola virus, remain unanswered for now.

A team of researchers led by Professor Fengcai Zhu, from the Jiangsu provincial center for disease prevention and control in China, tested the safety and immunogenicity of a novel Ebola vaccine, based on the 2014 Zaire Guinea Ebola strain, and delivered by a virus-like structure (known as a recombinant adenovirus type-5 vaccine). The experimental vaccine was developed by Beijing Institute of Biotechnology in Beijing, China, and Tianjin CanSino Biotechnology in Tianjin, China.

When radiation suddenly contaminates the land your family has farmed and lived on for generations, you might not expect soil to protect crops and human health - that is like expecting the mugging victim to track down the criminal - but that is what happens.

On March 11th, 2011, twin perils of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami caused widespread destruction in Japan, including peril at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The plant released radioactivity into the environment and the Japanese government evacuated over 100,000 people in the 30 kilometer zone around the plant.

Both vegetarians and elite environmental activists have long considered meat as a vital food to cut if we are to reduce global emissions. For poor people, elites in developed nations believe beans would be a good substitute. While their 'it takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef' metric has long been debunked, they are not wrong for believing that livestock leads to emissions that would not be evident if we did not want the world's poorest to be equal to the rich when it comes to nutrition.

Cyber warfare, killer robots, biological pandemics due to mad scientists, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has grown since the old days of just figuring out how to kill nuclear power.

The Nobel Prize-winning Higgs boson – the “God particle” - believed to be vital for understanding all of the mass in the universe, was found in 2012 at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, but that's not where the search began.

Instead, the first hint of the boson was inspired by studies of superconductors – a special class of metals that, when cooled to very low temperatures, allow electrons to move without resistance. The discovery of the Higgs boson verified the Standard Model, which predicted that particles gain mass by passing through a field that slows down their movement through the vacuum of space. Now a team of physicists has brought that work full circle, by reporting the first-ever observations of the Higgs mode in superconducting materials. 

Do you ever have trouble telling right from left? For example, you’re taking a driving lesson and the instructor asks you to take a left turn and you pause, struggling to think of which way is left.

If so, you’re not on your own – a significant proportion of our population has difficulty in telling right from left.

Mention the terms “intellectual giftedness” and “learning disability” and there is a general understanding of what each term means. However, most people are unaware that in many circumstances the two can go hand in hand.

Current US research suggests that 14% of children who are identified as being intellectually gifted may also have a learning disability. This is compared to about 4% of children in the general population. No-one has been able to explain this discrepancy.

For people taking glucocorticoids such as prednisone, the increased risk of bone fracture is a well-documented side effect. Used to treat a variety of medical conditions, including autoimmune diseases and allergies, glucocorticoids are known to cause rapid deterioration in bone strength.

Until now, doctors have been able to measure bone loss -- a process that happens slowly, over time -- but haven't had the means for gauging actual bone strength. That has changed thanks to a new hand-held instrument developed in the Hansma Lab at UC Santa Barbara. Called the OsteoProbe, the device uses reference point indentation (RPI) to measure mechanical properties of bone at the tissue level.