was the title of a history book I had as a boy.  Good things, in their way — without them, I wouldn’t be able to sit here talking to you all and meeting some very interesting people online.  But some decidedly unpleasant customers do all too often hitch a ride.

There are lots of distance runners in the United States, there is no real gender gap about participation. But there is when it comes to competition, the difference is there.

A new paper in Evolutionary Psychology says that, on average, American men participate at track meets about three times as often as American women, and this difference has been consistent since the late 1990s. By contrast, at road races, the sex difference in participation has disappeared.

In the past, researchers have primarily used the genetic history of mothers to understand evolution in animals, but a new study has investigated ancestry across the red fox genome, including the Y chromosome (paternal line) and  found some surprises about the origins, journey and evolution of the red fox, the world's most widely distributed land carnivore.

Conventional thinking based on maternal genetics suggested that red foxes of Eurasia and North America composed a single interconnected population across the Bering land bridge between Asia and Alaska.

We all have the legal right to refuse health care. Credit: Warren Goldswain

By Margaret Brown, University of South Australia

Have you thought about how you would want to be treated if you cannot make your own decisions?

By Jon Entine, Genetic Literacy Project

Visit almost any anti-GMO website and you will find alarming headlines about the alleged dangers of GMO foods. They kill pigs, cows and sheep on farms and in lab studies! Humans are next!

Sparkling Violetear.
Image courtesy of Paul Martin

By Katharine Gammon, Inside Science

(Inside Science) – Most of the time, for an individual animal, the bigger you are, the more likely you are to succeed. But sometimes, the little guy prevails – and scientists are just starting to understand how and when this happens.

“While there has been research on body size and aggressive conflict, no one had looked at why small species can prevail,” said Paul Martin, a biologist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura have been award the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources". Using blue LEDs, white light can be created in a new way and that means LED lamps, which are longer-lasting and more efficient than incandescent sources.

Sodium is back in the health concern cycle and an analysis of data in the federal nationwide dietary intake survey known as "What We Eat in America NHANES 2009-2010," has led a team of Department of Agriculture (USDA) to conclude that, on any given day 49 percent of U.S. adults eat at least one sandwich, and sandwiches account for 20 percent of total daily sodium intake. 

No one is seriously expecting to overturn Einstein's idea of time dilation, and instead the goal is often to find the possible limits. That means looking for deviations in experiments with increasing precision or under extreme conditions.