Rapid eye movements, known as saccades, have been a source of a nature versus nurture debate. 

One hypothesis has been that this neurological behaviour is a product of culture in people of Chinese origin. A new study casts doubt on that. 
Scientists tested three groups – students from mainland China, British people with Chinese parents and white British people – to see how quickly their eyes reacted to dots appearing in the periphery of their vision.
These express saccades – particularly fast responses which begin a tenth of a second after a target appears - were similar in British and mainland Chinese while white British participants made far fewer.

Conventional wisdom and sociological arguments have claimed that societies with more men than women, such as China, will become more violent, but a new study has found that a male-biased sex ratio does not lead to more crime.

Rates of rape, sexual assault and homicide are actually lower in societies with more men than women, the study found, and evolutionary theories predicting that when males outnumber females, males will compete more vigorously for the limited number of mates don’t hold up either. 

“Here, we untangle the logic behind the widely held notion that in human societies where men outnumber women, there will be more violence,” said anthropology professor Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of U.C. Davis, co-author of the study.

Vapor losses to the walls of laboratory chambers haven't been properly factored in, according to a new PNAS paper, and that has caused researchers to underestimate the formation of secondary organic aerosol in the atmosphere. It also brings up a lot of questions about what other simplistic mistakes have led to all kinds of air quality claims.

Vapor losses can suppress the formation of secondary organic aerosol, which in turn has contributed to the under-prediction of secondary organic aerosol (SOA) in climate and air quality models. Secondary organic aerosols are formed primarily through chemistry that occurs in the gas phase.

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey  - BOSS - is the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) and pioneered the use of quasars to map density variations in intergalactic gas at high redshifts, tracing the structure of the young universe.

BOSS charts the history of the universe's expansion and new measures of large-scale structure have yielded the most precise measurement of expansion since galaxies first formed.  

Federal appointees do not report to the public. They are political picks chosen to advance the agenda of their administration. Since they are picked to influence issues of science, politics comes first, and science might come second — but, more often than not, last. That explains how institutions such as the EPA and Nuclear Regulatory Commission ignore and suppress inconvenient research. 

Frustratingly, political appointees and their hand-picked experts are also determining the future health of our children. Administration True Believers are deciding what is dogma and what is heretical. We’re facing a looming Food Inquisition, and few people seem to notice.

According to the FDA, a drug is a substance (other than nutrients) intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, or to affect the structure or function of the body. Seems clear enough -- that is, until politics and big money get involved. 

Then you get special dispensation. It’s called the dietary supplement industry. And what they get away with is astounding.

Last May a cluster of liver failure was attributed to a supplement called OxyElite Pro, sold by USPLabs of Dallas.

Is there a link between maternal obesity during pregnancy and the risk of developmental disorders in a child? In the wide world of epigenetics and causalation there can be, because no one can prove there can't be. However, if obesity is a link at all, paternal obesity could be a greater risk factor than maternal obesity, according to a new paper from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. 

Dr. Pål Surén claims to be the first to study the role of paternal obesity in autism and emphasizes that this is still speculation on its way to becoming a hypothesis. Surén
notes it requires much more research before anyone can discuss possible causal relationships but they have what they have. 

Antipsychotic medications are often used for in 'second-generation' form - that is, for unlabeled indications, such as treatment of children and adolescents with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Currently, atypical antipsychotic medications are FDA approved for use only in youth for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and irritability associated with autism. To date, no atypical antipsychotic agent has an FDA-labeled indication for use in behavioral disorders in children and adolescents.

Each year prostate tissue samples are taken from over a million men around the world, in most cases using 12 large biopsy needles, to check whether they have prostate cancer.

Surely in 2014 something more modern can be developed, especially when 70 percent of men getting those don't have cancer, it's unnecessarily painful and is also costly to carry out.

A patient-friendly examination, which drastically reduces the need for biopsies, and may even eliminate them altogether, has been developed at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), together with AMC Amsterdam and will be presented at the European Association of Urology Congress in Stockholm next week.

Of the uncertainties facing climate modelers, climate feedbacks from decomposition by soil microbes are among the biggest. 

The dynamics among soil microbes allow them to work more efficiently and flexibly as they break down organic matter – spewing less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than previously thought, according to a new study from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the University of Vienna published in Ecology Letters.