One possible future in the therapy of children with cognitive and motor-skill disabilities could involve the popular Finnish game "Angry Birds" - and a robot.

Georgia Institute of Technology recently paired a small humanoid robot with an Android tablet and then asked kids to teach the robot how to play the game, dragging their finger on the tablet to whiz the bird across the screen.

The robot watches what happens and records "snapshots" in its memory. It notices where fingers start and stop, and how the objects on the screen move according to each other, while constantly keeping an eye on the score to check for signs of success. 

People love to latch onto studies that match their confirmation bias, so studies claiming health benefits for red wine, chocolate and organic food get a lot of attention and not much skepticism about controls. Any epidemiology claim will do when it comes to finding benefit or harm.

A new review calls into question previous studies which suggest that consuming light-to-moderate amounts of alcohol (0.6-0.8 fluid ounces/day) may have a protective effect on cardiovascular health. Instead, they find that reducing the amount of alcoholic beverages consumed, even for light-to-moderate drinkers, is more likely to improve cardiovascular health, body mass index (BMI) and blood pressure. 

No one worries about children like parents, and having a child with a pacemaker is even more worrisome. But kids who are worried over too much develop a low sense of self-competence which can contribute to decreased quality of life, according to a paper in Journal of Developmental&Behavioral Pediatric.

What's a concussion? Since 10 doctors can give 10 different answers it's unclear, but they are the subject of a lawsuit by former NFL football players, and thus concern has trickled down to school age children and there needs to be a consistent evidence-based definition.

A research review has identified the clinical indicators most strongly associated with concussion as an important first step in the process of developing evidence-based guidelines for concussion diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.

Based on analysis of the best available research data, a multidisciplinary panel of experts has identified a set of four indicators with the "highest and most consistent prevalence" among patients with possible concussion.

As with people, some chimpanzees are smarter than others, and as with people, a lot of that variation in intelligence depends on the genes that individuals carry and pass on from one generation to the next.

A new study found no effect of either sex or rearing history on the cognitive skills of chimpanzees. That is, chimpanzees raised by human caretakers performed no better on cognitive tests delivered to them by humans than did individuals raised by their chimpanzee mothers.

Researchers have matched an upward curve in temperatures in the last few decades with increases in patient's seeking treatment for kidney stones, which both reflects and foretells a warming planet's impact on human health, they say. Of course, they also found increases in very low temperatures.

Researchers using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico discovered a split-second burst of radio waves, the first time that a so-called "fast radio burst" has been detected using an instrument other than the Parkes radio telescope in Australia.

Scientists using the Parkes Observatory have recorded a handful of such events but because no other facilities did, the assumption was that the Australian instrument was picking up signals originating from sources on or near Earth.

There is a belief that someone decides to try a cigarette, reads a warning label, and then never does. This belief is perpetuated by the industry that has built itself around taxing and penalizing cigarette companies and taking that money to lobby against cigarettes.

It is the perfect business model because it does not work, and so there will always be a market.

Every once in a while, psychologists will do some surveys and provide a paper reaffirming new ways to make sure anti-smoking efforts are always funded but never succeed. In this case, by saying warning labels just need to be bigger.

Sometimes we have to wonder in amazement about things found out in the universe. Case in point: a slinky string of pearls twisted into a corkscrew shape.

Nothing special about that. Except this string is 100,000 light years long.

The pearls in the string are superclusters of blazing, blue-white, newly born stars and the structure forms a bridge between two giant elliptical galaxies that are colliding. These young, blue "super star clusters" are evenly spaced along the chain at separations of 3,000 light-years from one another.

There are a lot of conflicting reports about the common elbow surgery made famous by Major League Baseball pitcher, Tommy John - Ulna Collateral Ligament (UCL) reconstruction surgery. Some reports show it helps pitchers win more games, some show it does not.