Numerous studies have concluded that children who were breastfed score higher on IQ tests and perform better in school.

Why would that be? Is it the mother-baby bonding time, something in breast milk or other attributes of families that have mothers who breastfeed their babies?

Sociologists from Brigham Young University think they have the answer and pinpoint two sources of this cognitive boost: Responding to children's emotional cues and reading to children starting at 9 months of age. Breastfeeding mothers tend to do both of those things, said lead author Ben Gibbs. 

Once a month, millions of women change their economic behavior and become more focused on their social standing relative to other women, says a paper written by scholars from The University of Texas at San Antonio and the University of Minnesota.

Why are women such slaves to the moon? It's the ovulatory cycle, they assert, and it alters women's behavior by subconsciously motivating them to outdo other women. 

The Smithsonian's Submillimeter Array (SMA) telescope has providec the most detailed view yet of stellar nurseries within the Snake nebula and what they found lends new insight into how cosmic seeds can grow into massive stars.

Stretching across almost 100 light-years of space, the Snake nebula is located about 11,700 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.

In images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope it appears as a sinuous, dark tendril against the starry background, thus the name. It was targeted in the new study because it shows the potential to form many massive stars - stars that are 8 times heavier than our Sun.

Wind farms are not very good. Yes, politicians embrace them because the unions advocating them donate heavily to campaigns, and environmentalists advocate them because they always advocate something new until it becomes popular (natural gas the 1980s, ethanol in the 1990s, then wind - anything but nuclear) but aside from a lot of dead endangered birds, wind hasn't helped much.

But concern that wind farms would cause more global warming are overblown. They don't help, and they are unsightly and ridiculously expensive, but they sure don't hurt, even though they were previously implicated in more heat and rainfall in Europe.

The eggs produced by adolescent girls are not the same as the ones produced by adult women, according to a recent study in Human Molecular Genetics, which lists evidence that there are two completely distinct types of eggs in the mammalian ovary – "the first wave" and "the adult wave".

 Professor Kui Liu from the University of Gothenburg and colleagues used two genetically modified mouse models to show that the first wave of eggs, which starts immediately after birth, contributes to the onset of puberty and provides fertilizable eggs into the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

In contrast, the adult wave remains in a state of dormancy until activated during the adult life and then provides eggs throughout the entire reproductive lifespan.

If a name is ambiguous and given without context, humans struggle to understand the meaning, so you can imagine the struggle computers have.

 When Germans read the last name "Merkel" without context, they will not know if it refers to the Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel or tsoccer coach Max Merkel.  And 

Human exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) has recently been linked to negative health claims, like a decline in reproductive function in adults and stunted neurodevelopment in children, and so people consumed with the 'natural' fallacy have been up in arms about it.  It hasn't quite become 'BPA causes autism' hysteria, like they did with vaccines, but it is getting close. 

Naturally, companies have listened to the nocebo worries of the natural-obsessed and dutifully created BPA-free products and charged more money for them.

Two computer scientists at at the University of Liverpool think they have successfully cracked the Erdős discrepancy problem (for a particular discrepancy bound C=2), an 80 year old maths puzzle proposed by the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, who offered $500 for its solution.

They just can't be sure, because it is too big for a human to replicate.The resulting proof generated is an enormous 13 gigabytes, 30 percent larger than downloading all of the content on Wikipedia.

Autism diagnoses have gone up a lot in the last generation. It was to the 2000s what ADD diagnoses were to the 1990s. 

And so people have rushed to attribute blame. Vaccines, GMOs, even BPA. If someone is selling alternative medicine, food or culture they have found a way to link their competition to autism. And then there is the idea that it is simply better diagnoses. And the charge that it has been over-diagnosed.

New diagnosis guidelines by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) have therapists and some families in a panic, because in an effort to be more scientific and less subjectively symptom-based, the new guidelines could leave them without a diagnosis. No diagnosis means no insurance coverage.

A new method for the treatment of phantom limb pain after an amputation has been initially tested on a patient who has suffered from severe phantom limb pain for 48 years. The case study shows a drastic reduction of pain.

It is common for people who lose an arm or a leg to experience phantom sensations, as if the missing limb were still there. 70 percent of amputees experience pain in the amputated limb despite the fact that it no longer exists. Obviously that can be frustrating. Phantom limb pain can become a deteriorating condition that reduces the quality of life considerably, but how do you treat the disease when you don't know the cause?