It could be in a billion years, it could start tomorrow, but physicists have long predicted that the universe may one day collapse, and that everything in it will be compressed to a small hard ball.

Like a lot of things, it just takes a little mathematics to conclude that the risk of a collapse is even greater than previously thought.

A new species of fossil horse from 4.4 million-year-old fossil-rich deposits in Ethiopia, 
Eurygnathohippus woldegabrieli, was about the size of a small zebra, Eurygnathohippus woldegabrieli, had three-toed hooves and grazed the grasslands and shrubby woods in the Afar Region, according to its naming in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The horse fills a gap in the evolutionary history of horses but is also important for documenting how old a fossil locality is and in reconstructing habitats of human forebears of the time, said Scott Simpson, professor of anatomy at Case Western Reserve's School of Medicine, and co-author of the research. "This horse is one piece of a very complex puzzle that has many, many pieces."

Ignoring meaningless platitudes like 'age is all in your mind', age is more than a number of years. 'You are as young as you feel' may be more apt because factors such as health, cognitive function and disability rates are important ways to measure age in all its dimensions.

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
population researchers Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov seek to reorient the way demographers study population aging, providing a new toolbox of methodologies for demographers to better understand the impacts of an aging population on society, by measuring based instead on characteristics of people that change with age, including life expectancy, health, cognitive function, and other measures. 

Approximately 1 in 88 children are diagnosed as being somewhere on the autism spectrum. One hypothesis about autism is that a hyperactive immune system results in elevated levels of inflammation and may contribute to the disorder. Approximately one third of those on the autism spectrum, slightly above placebo levels, show a clinical improvement in symptoms in response to a fever.

This month, 23andMe, the most prominent genetic home testing company, stopped offering anything more than ancestry results due to a warning by the FDA that its marketing claims about the value of their health-related reports were not backed by evidence regarding their accuracy.

The FDA was concerned that inaccurate results, including false positives or negatives, could lead some customers to seek treatment for diseases they don't actually have, or to begin to medicate improperly, which has potentially fatal results,

When you hear people talk about diversity, they often mean they want a majority of people just like them. Anything less is worrisome. It's that way in sports teams, the halls of academia and even church.

People who are part of a religious congregation's largest racial group are more likely to feel they belong and be more involved, whether their group is barely half or nearly all of the members, according to surveys collated in a sociology paper.

A standard joke among the elites of New York City And Los Angeles is that everyone is in therapy - it's possible because they are likely more rich and, it turns out, many psychiatrists are not interested in patients who aren't wealthy enough to not need to use insurance to pay.

But Congress, motivated by public outrage at recent mass shootings and their link to psychiatric medications, want mental health care to be covered by insurance and for psychiatrists to have the same standards as government-paid doctors have.

A new solar panel design and ceramic material points the way to potentially providing sustainable power that can be price competitive and efficient. It also reaches a four-decade-old goal of discovering a bulk photovoltaic material that can harness energy from visible and infrared light, not just ultraviolet light.

The stereotype is that athletes are often less smart than their non-athletic peers and a new paper says it may not be that athletes go into more physical pursuits but that the sports themselves may lead to lower test scores.

Two groups of Dartmouth athletes were studied: 80 football and ice hockey players in the contact sports group, and 79 athletes drawn from such non-contact sports as track, crew and Nordic skiing. The football and hockey players wore helmets equipped with accelerometers, which enabled the researchers to compile the number and severity of impacts to their heads. Players who sustained a concussion during the season were not included in the analysis.

A hydrogel scaffold for craniofacial bone tissue regeneration starts as a liquid and then solidifies into a gel in the body and liquefies again for removal. 

The material is a soluble liquid at room temperature that can be injected to the point of need. At body temperature, the material turns instantly into a gel to help direct the formation of new bone to replace that damaged by injury or disease. It conforms to irregular three-dimensional spaces and provides a platform for functional and aesthetic tissue regeneration and is intended as an alternative to prefabricated implantable scaffolds. It then liquefies again for removal.