Can a big name lead to a boost, even for low-profile work?

Indeed it can, according to an analysis which found that scientific papers written by well-known scholars get more attention than they otherwise would receive because of their authors’ high profiles - but there are some subtle twists in how this happens.

It's believed that humans discovered fire over a million years ago but when it became something controlled and used for daily needs is unknown.

Fire is central to the rise of human culture and a discovery by archeologists at Qesem Cave, a site near present-day Rosh Ha’ayin in the Central District of Israel, has pushed the date for  unequivocal repeated fire building over a continuous period back a little farther - back to around 300,000 years ago.

In a way, you could be walking on water right now.

Water is carried to the mantle by deep sea fault zones which penetrate the oceanic plate as it bends into the subduction zone. Subduction, where an oceanic tectonic plate is forced beneath another plate, causes large earthquakes such as the recent Tohoku earthquake, as well as many earthquakes that occur hundreds of kilometers below the Earth's surface.

Over the age of the Earth, the Japan subduction zone alone could transport the equivalent of up to three and a half times the water of all the Earth's oceans to its mantle, according to a new paper which shows that deep sea fault zones could transport much larger amounts of water from the Earth's oceans to the upper mantle than previously thought. 

Around 25.8 million Americans have diabetes and up to 79 million may be at risk for for it.

A paper in the European Journal of General Practice
 says that a simple blood test reveals an individual's risk of developing type-2 diabetes before they develop either condition — far earlier than previously believed.

In healthy people, glucose is absorbed from the blood for use by various tissues. But the cells of people with type-2 diabetes are resistant to insulin, which is produced by the pancreas and is central to regulating carbohydrate and fat metabolism in the body. These individuals have higher-than-normal blood glucose levels. People with a "prediabetes" risk of getting diabetes have blood glucose levels somewhere between normal and diabetic. 

A new study has found that  a therapeutic music process that includes writing song lyrics and producing videos
helps adolescents and young adults undergoing cancer treatment gain coping skills and resilience-related outcomes.

Children suffer from the consequences of maternal drug exposure during pregnancy and Cannabis is one of the most frequently used substances.

A new study was done using mice and human brain tissue to decipher the molecular basis of how the major psychoactive component from Cannabis called delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol or THC affects brain development of the unborn fetus. 

NGC 5194, also known as M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, is one of the most spectacular examples of a spiral galaxy, with two spiral arms curling into one another in a billowing swirl, this galaxy hosts over a hundred billion stars and is currently merging with its companion, the smaller galaxy NGC 5195.

Around 30 million light-years away, the Whirlpool Galaxy is close enough to be easily spotted even with binoculars. Using the best telescopes available both on the ground and in space, astronomers can scrutinize its population of stars in extraordinary detail.

Chapter 10 of the report on the 2013 community summer study held at Snowmass, titled "Communication, Education, and Outreach" is available since Jan 24th in the Cornell ArXiv. It is a 26-pages document describing the importance of outreach activities to foster the development of particle physics, and offering ideas and strategies to improve the communication between scientists and policy makers. This is none other than the problem I have often referred to as the one of "filling the gap" between science and the general media.

In a forthcoming episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast, Julia and I discuss the philosophy and science of suicide, i.e. what empirical inquiry tells us about suicides (who commits them, how, what are the best strategies for prevention) and how philosophical reflection may lead us to think of suicide. In this post I will focus on the philosophical side of the discussion, for which an excellent summary source, with a number of additional references, is this article by Michael Cholbi in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, to which I will keep referring below.

Prion proteins are "misfolded"and cause a group of incurable neurodegenerative diseases, including spongiform encephalopathies (for example, mad cow diseases) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. 

Prions are unique infective agents. Unlike viruses, bacteria, fungi and other parasites, prions do not contain either DNA or RNA. Despite their seemingly simple structure, they can propagate their pathological effects like wildfire, by "infecting" normal proteins.

PrPSc (the pathological form of the prion protein) can induce normal prion proteins (PrPC) to acquire the wrong conformation and convert into further disease-causing agents.