An international team has discovered what happens on a molecular basis to insects that evolved resistance to genetically modified cotton plants. 

Their findings shed light on how the global caterpillar pest called pink bollworm overcomes biotech cotton, which was designed to make the organic insect-killing bacterial protein called Bt toxin. The results could have major impacts for managing pest resistance to Bt crops. 

ATS 2014, SAN DIEGO ─ A large study of intensive care patients in California found that public reporting of patient outcomes did not reduce mortality, but did result in reduced admission of the sickest patients to the ICU and increased transfer of critically ill patients to other hospitals.

"Public reporting is designed to reduce mortality by steering patients towards high-quality hospitals and creating incentives for hospitals to adopt quality improvement programs," said Lora Reineck, MD, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. "But the reality does not necessarily meet the expectation."

I came to know through a social network (I have many colleagues as friends there, and they usually post more useful stuff than cute kittens) that ATLAS has launched a very intriguing competition. One you can participate to, if you have some programming skills; no knowledge of particle physics is needed.

The idea is to ask you to classify as signal (Higgs decay to tau lepton pairs, if you really want to know!) or background (anything that looks similar to it but involves no Higgs boson) a set of 550,000 events, for each of which ATLAS gives you 30 kinematical quantities measured in the detector (it is a simulation, but it's a pretty good approximation of reality).

Overweight political candidates have gotten fewer votes than thinner opponents, finds a new study co-authored by a Michigan State University weight bias expert.

Of course, discrimination is everywhere, it is the favored position of the humanities in trying to quantify culture. In 2008, Democrats discriminated against Senator Hillary Clinton because she was a woman while Republicans were against Senator Obama in the general election because he was black. No one ever just acknowledged he was the best candidate, even in winning we were told it was despite his race.

So political parties should be picking the thinnest candidates? That explains why Pres. Obama beat Gov. Mitt Romney in 2012. He had a smaller waist.

A new study demonstrates the importance of considering developmental differences when creating programs for cochlear implants in infants.

Cochlear implants, which are surgically placed in the inner ear, provide the ability to hear for some people with severe to profound hearing loss. Because of technological and biological limitations, people with cochlear implants hear differently than those with normal hearing.

In recent court cases involving affirmative action for university admissions, the obvious question became 'when should it ever end?' and how is that not discrimination? Supporters of race-based admissions argued that ending discrimination would mean favoritism.

Favoritism is something less understood than as a form of discrimination, the oft-repeated belief is that discrimination is a hostile act, but a new paper in American Psychologist argues it is even worse than believed. It's a review of other psychology papers, which are overrun with stereotype threats and Implicit Association tests, so the results are not a surprise.

There is a discovery out there that has shown some success with multiple sclerosis, with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS - Lou Gehrig's Disease), and has even improved the function of aging hearts – but despite all that, you have probably never heard of it.

No, this is not a story about how a revolutionary breakthrough got bought up by some giant corporation and stuck in a warehouse to protect their profits - it is instead a story about how potentially good products may never see the light of day for lots of reasons. It happens more often than you think.

Every day, I make my wife two or three cups of coffee. I am serving her a phenol-laced liquid, containing 826 volatile chemical substances, 16 of which are known by the state of California to cause cancer.

Images of Saturn's auroras as the planet's magnetic field is battered by charged particles from the Sun have led a team to claim decisive evidence for the hypothesis that Saturn's auroral displays are often caused by the dramatic collapse of its "magnetic tail".

Just like comets, planets such as Saturn and the Earth have a "tail" – known as the magnetotail – that is made up of electrified gas from the Sun and flows out in the planet's wake.

When a particularly strong burst of particles from the Sun hits Saturn, it can cause the magnetotail to collapse, with the ensuing disturbance of the planet's magnetic field resulting in spectacular auroral displays. A very similar process happens here on Earth.

New research does not support claims that fluoridating water adversely affects children's mental development and adult IQ.

The researchers were testing the claim that exposure to levels of fluoride used in community water fluoridation is toxic to the developing brain and can cause IQ deficits.  The data used in the American Journal of Public Health article used data from the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Study, which   has followed nearly all aspects of the health and development of around 1,000 people born in Dunedin in 1972-1973 up to age 38.