If you want your daughter to do better in science, get her exercising, says a paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. All teens benefit, girls more. The improvements were sustained over the long term, with the findings pointing to a dose-response effect—the more intensive exercise was taken, the greater the impact on test results.

They base their findings on a representative sample of almost 5,000 children who were all part of the Children of the 90s study, also known as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). This is tracking the long term health of around 14,000 children born in the U.K. between 1991 and 1992 in the South West of England.

Active camouflage update. In a Harvard School of Engineering laboratory test, a team of applied physicists placed a device  with a new coating that intrinsically conceals its own temperature to thermal cameras on a hot plate and watched it through an infrared camera as the temperature rose.

Initially, it behaved as expected, giving off more infrared light as the sample was heated: at 60 degrees Celsius it appeared blue-green to the camera; by 70 degrees it was red and yellow. At 74 degrees it turned a deep red—and then something strange happened. The thermal radiation plummeted. At 80 degrees it looked blue, as if it could be 60 degrees, and at 85 it looked even colder. Moreover, the effect was reversible and repeatable, many times over.

Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) is a common human virus, you get a cold sore near the mouth, but a study of the full genetic code of HSV-1 shows a dramatic confirmation of the "out-of-Africa" pattern of human migration., according to their paper.

Geneticists explore how organisms are related by studying changes in the sequence of bases, or "letters" on their genes. From knowledge of how quickly a particular genome changes, they can construct a "family tree" that shows when particular variants had their last common ancestor.

Studies of human genomes have shown that our ancestors emerged from Africa roughly 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, and then spread eastward toward Asia, and westward toward Europe.

There's a reason why organic food sickens far more people than conventional produce; a lack of science in agricultural practices.

Researchers have identified some agricultural management practices in the field that can either boost or reduce the risk of contamination in produce from two major foodborne pathogens: salmonella, the biggest single killer among the foodborne microbes, and Listeria monocytogenes. 

Greenpeace was founded on a pretense of humanitarian action - between 1969 and 1971, they gathered together because they wanted to put an end to hydrogen bomb testing. Later they lost their way and it became about whales and, in the US, being a political action committee for an entire raft of anti-science issues, protesting everything from clean energy to food. Thanks for doing your part to cause global warming, Greenpeace.

'A peculiar Scottish disorder' is described in the Scottish Medical Journal (SMJ), August 2011 vol. 56 no. 3, pp. 164-166 (by Doctor I. B. McIntosh.)

 “A highly contagious behavioural affliction is now endemic in highland areas of Scotland. Pretravel advice ought to include a health warning to sport-lovers venturing north into wild, highlands of Gaeldom. It particularly affects young adults and predominates in men, although women are affected. The disorder can be acute or chronic and when severe, it can threaten one’s life and limbs. Acute attacks may bring spontaneous recovery in months, but the chronic state can last for a life-time. Death will overtake some before it runs its inevitable course.”

It was the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan who popularized the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and originated the closely related concept of scientific skepticism.

In the case discussed here, skeptics we should be.

Yesterday evening I chanced to attend, invited by a friend, the opening of the 2013-2014 academic year of the university of Venice "Ca' Foscari", which was held at the Malibran theater. It was the first time I attended one such event, since technically (and practically) I am not an academic, but a researcher at the INFN, the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics. I do occasionally teach university courses (I just took a break from doing so after 5 years of teaching a course of subnuclear physics for 5th year undergraduates); but I do that for the university of Padova, not Venice - my office is at the department of physics of the university of Padova. Besides, Venice does not have a course of laurea in Physics.

Oxygen was essential for advanced life to evolve; ancient dinosaurs and modern large-brained mammals needed a lot of oxygen to keep their large and sophisticated organisms running.   Some simple organisms like bacteria can survive without oxygen, but all higher organisms need it our atmosphere's 21 percent oxygen is essential for the human brain to function. 

So why did life not explode when oxygen levels rose dramatically 2.1 billion years ago? The oxygen content 2.1 billion years ago was probably the same as when life exploded around 542 million years ago - the Cambrian explosion, where oxygen levels rose to up to 10 pct. Before that life consisted of small and simple, typically single-celled life forms.

If you walk by the checkout counters at most supermarkets,you might come to believe that changing your behavior is almost impossible.  Every month, the headlines from countless magazines scream out with advice to lose weight, get in shape, and help yourself to feel better.   Apparently, everyone is constantly struggling with their weight and fitness.