Call it the buoyancy of the brood.

When facing a flood, ants build rafts and find other ways to minimize injury or death - they can basically use the brood to act as a life preserver - according to a new paper. The queen ant goes in the middle and is protected on all sides by the rafting ants.

 Wherever he is, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim a/k/a Paracelsus must be doing the Foxtrot in his grave. Because somehow a bunch of dopes have managed to “correct” something he got absolutely right 600 years ago. You know what it is.

 Unfortunately, the dopes are not so dopey when it comes to spreading their message: Because a chemical is toxic or carcinogenic in high doses (usually in rodent experiments) that it poses a danger to humans at miniscule doses. Therefore we should be scared of any chemical that they tell us is dangerous, regardless of the exposure. And their list is endless.

Why are some people are unable to break free of their delusions, despite overwhelming evidence explaining the delusion isn't real?

A new paper by a philosopher offers as good an explanation as any, that dreams and delusions have a common link – they are associated with faulty "reality testing" in the brain's higher order cognitive systems. 

Chronic pain diagnoses are easy to obtain. Because it is symptom-based medicine and a subjective ailment, it's difficult to say what is real and what isn't.

In cases where the ailment is psychological, the treatment is also, and a new review paper finds that psychological interventions provide more relief than prescription drugs or surgery, though they are used much less frequently than traditional medical. According to the paper, almost half of American adults suffer from chronic pain, and who are you to tell anyone they are not in pain?

Duckweed is a tiny floating plant  that often becomes a hard-to-control weed in ponds and small lakes.

Yet these ecological lemons might become energy lemonade.

It's not all bad, duckweed has been used to clean contaminated water and to produce pharmaceuticals, and now the genome of Greater Duckweed (Spirodela polyrhiza) has given this miniscule plant's potential as a biofuel source a big boost. 

If China wants to save .009 of its population by 2050, they need to implement UN tobacco control policies, including surveillance and monitoring of tobacco use prevalence, creation of smoke-free environments, treatment of tobacco dependence, tobacco consumption taxation and other price controls, enforcement of heath warnings on tobacco packages and marketing bans. 

It used to be that only rich people could afford to be fat. Now only rich people can afford to be thin.

And there's even a growing income gap when it comes to suicide.

Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland but that doesn't make it equal, and the authors of a paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology have found that assisted suicide is more common in wealthier areas.

Would avant-garde musician be offended that scientists named a zit-causing bacterium P. acnes type Zappae.

No, he would probably laugh. 

Scientific institutions and organizations can improve their communication and outreach with the public by addressing people's strongly held beliefs about science and its role in society - and using less demagoguery. Or at least hiding it.

Lead author of a new paper and American University professor Matthew C. Nisbet made his name claiming that Republicans engaged in deception about science and that communicators needed to master "framing" to show how they were wrong, so a paper advocating less partisanship is important, in a sort of 'only Nixon could go to China' way.

Researchers have made a discovery regarding the behavior of a synthetic molecular oscillator, which could serve as a timekeeping device to control artificial cells.