Not enough tobacco company money is going into public health campaigns. Credit: REUTERS/Daniel Munoz

By Nicholas Freudenberg, City University of New York

The #20 Million Memorial created earlier this month by the United States Centers for Disease Control, is an online tribute to honor the 20 million spouses, mothers, fathers, children, sisters, brothers, and friends who have died of tobacco-related diseases since 1964.

Fewer cords, smaller antennas and quicker video is the goal of a microwave circuit that has set a new world record for data transmission. 

Alpine goats appear to be shrinking in size, according to scholars at Durham University, and that is due to global warming over the past 30 years, they say.  

Young Chamois now weigh about 25 percent less than animals of the same age in the 1980s, they found, and note that in recent years, decreases in body size have been identified in a variety of animal species and have frequently been linked by other scholars to changing climate. 

Since December 2004 there have been 18 quakes of 8.0 or greater on the moment magnitude (Mw) scale – a rate more than twice that seen from 1900 to mid-2004.

Some of that difference could be due to unprecedented advances in technological and scientific capacity to detect earthquakes. Like the distance of Babe Ruth's homeruns, anecdotes about past earthquakes have the mist of legend shrouding them, but modern earthquakes have a variety of ways they can be understood - and that helps recalibrate risk for future earthquakes.

Why were so many middle-aged adults hit especially hard by the H1N1 influenza virus during the 2013-2014 influenza season?

 Vaccines work by stimulating the immune system to produce antibody proteins against particles (called antigens) from an infectious agent, such as bacteria or a virus. The immune system saves the cells that produce effective antibodies, which then provide immunity against future attacks by the same or similar infectious agents. Seasonal influenza typically kills 36,000 Americans, alone, and nearly 500,000 individuals around the world each year. 

Sperm donation for fertility issues has been common for some time and ovum donation has become increasingly accepted by women as well.

That leads to sociological questions about selection; everyone says they will love their kids no matter what, but given a book to choose from, what traits in a donor do people consider most important, beauty, intelligence or health?

Some children are allergic to milk, so they drink milk substitutes such as soy or rice. And almond milk has become a well-marketed fad to due health claims.

But there may be negatives: though many of those products are fortified, children who drink them have lower levels of Vitamin D in their blood than those who drink cow's milk, according to a paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. 

Even depressed people are essentially optimistic - they believe that tomorrow will be better, even though that belief probably won't lead to better outcomes. That is true optimism.

A paper in Clinical Psychological Science says that middle-aged adults who had a history of depression evaluated their past and current lives in more negative terms than adults without depression - but the future was just as rosy in both groups.

Eliminating subsidies that help low- and moderate-income people purchase coverage through government-run health insurance marketplaces would sharply boost costs for consumers and cause more than 11 million Americans to lose their health insurance, according to a new paper by the section of the RAND Corporation devoted to nationalizing health care.

A paper presented at the annual congress of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) in Berlin says that moderate cannabis use by adolescents does not lead to educational or intellectual decline, but that heavy cannabis use is associated with slightly poorer exam results at age 16.