Does home field advantage matter? In baseball outfielders, the tricks and corners of a new baseball park might be meaningful but that effect should diminish over time. The Seattle Seahawks have a famously loud stadium and the team calls the audience "the twelfth man" but they didn't need it to rout the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl.

There are no athletes in the Olympics who are from Sochi, yet psychologists believe that Russian athletes will have a psychological edge, even though Russia covers 6,600,000 million square miles, because they have a home field advantage.

While there is a glut of PhDs in academia, to an extent where some post-doc jobs don't even pay anything, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said in 2012 that America will need an additional 1,000,000 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates in the United States over the next decade to meet corporate economic needs. In a speech last week he ridiculed art history majors. He loves scientists and wants more of them.

Organic farms support more biodiversity, supporting 34% more plant, insect and animal species than conventional farms, according to a new paper. For pollinators such as bees, the number of different species was 50% higher on organic farms, although the authors stress that the study only looked at 'species richness'.

On January 25th 1996 the CDF collaboration submitted for publication to Physical Review Letters  the result of their measurement of the rate of jet production as a function of jet transverse energy, performed on 20 inverse picobarns of data collected by the experiment in the 1992-93 run of the Tevatron collider. That measurement deviated at its high-energy tail from predictions of quantum chromodynamics, suggesting that the underlying model -and most likely, the parton distribution functions (PDF) which describe the probability of finding partons with given fractions of their parent momentum- was at fault.

A new survey finds that nearly half of HIV-infected teenagers and young adults don't seek treatment unless the disease advances, which can them at risk for dangerous infections and long-term complications. It is accepted that starting treatment as early as possible can go long way toward keeping the virus in check and prevent the cardiovascular, renal and neurological damage characteristic of poorly controlled HIV infection over time.

Those most likely to delay treatment until they had advanced infections were males, blacks and Hispanics, the paper in
JAMA Pediatrics

Several years ago former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney had his doctors disable the wireless capabilities of his heart’s pacemaker to thwart any assassination attempt by hacking into his implant’s software.

The ongoing revelations of the many ways the NSA has been snooping into billions of cellphones and emails has roiled nations.As the technology that we use becomes more intimate in our lives and our very biology, the ability to abuse that interaction grows.

At 78 percent among people aged 50 and over, South Africa has the highest rate of high blood pressure reported for any country in the world, at any time in history. And less than 10 percent of people are effectively controlling their condition with medication, according to an analysis of data from the Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE) conducted by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which surveyed more than 35,000 people aged 50 and over in South Africa, China, Ghana, India, Mexico and Russia. 

British people traveling abroad for medical treatment are often unaware of the potential health and financial consequences they could face - with sometimes catastrophic effects for individual patients.

More than 63,000 UK residents travel abroad for medical treatment each year but many are embarking on medical tourism without doing research about the risks involved. These include a lack of redress in many countries should things go wrong, and the costs of non-emergency care at home to rectify poor outcomes of treatments received overseas. Since the UK has government-controlled health care, individuals are personally liable for those costs.

Exposure to short wavelength, blue, light during the biological day directly and immediately improves alertness and performance.

In order to determine which wavelengths of light were most effective in warding off fatigue, the researchers teamed with George Brainard, PhD, a professor of neurology at Thomas Jefferson University, who developed the specialized light equipment used in the study. Researchers compared the effects of blue light with exposure to an equal amount of green light on alertness and performance in 16 study participants for 6.5 hours over a day. Participants then rated how sleepy they felt, had their reaction times measured and wore electrodes to assess changes in brain activity patterns during the light exposure.  

Women who take nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen, naproxen and diclofenac during pregnancy are not at increased risk of miscarriages.

NSAIDs are used by pregnant women in the first trimester to combat pain, fever and inflammation.  Previous studies on whether they increase the risk of pregnancy loss have shown inconsistent results.