Eating more fruits and vegetables may reduce the risk of stroke worldwide, according to new research in the American Heart Association's journal Stroke.

Researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 20 studies published over the last 19 years to assess the effects of fruit and vegetable consumption on risk of stroke globally. The combined studies involved 760,629 men and women who had 16,981 strokes.

Stroke risk decreased by 32 percent with every 200 grams of fruit consumed each day and 11 percent with every 200 grams of vegetables consumed each day.

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Children with autism experience deficits in a type of immune cell that protects the body from infection. Called granulocytes, the cells exhibit one-third the capacity to fight infection and protect the body from invasion compared with the same cells in children who are developing normally.

The cells, which circulate in the bloodstream, are less able to deliver crucial infection-fighting oxidative responses to combat invading pathogens because of dysfunction in their tiny energy-generating organelles, the mitochondria.

The study is published online in the journal Pediatrics.

The anti-wheat movement is a popular health fad in America and critics of that staple now have a new weapon in their culture war - ditching it makes people more cooperative. And they explain Genghis Khan and Mao.

Defenders of wheat have their own ammunition - rice leads to despotism and communism. Cultural psychologists writing in Science claim that they can explain psychological differences between the people of northern and southern China mirror and also the differences between community-oriented East Asia and the more individualistic Western world - southern China has grown rice for thousands of years, whereas the north has grown wheat.

States can pass all of the laws they want but a US Army soldier, active duty or otherwise, is going to be in serious trouble if there is evidence they have used marijuana. It does not matter if you claim to have pain or get a note from your doctor, the Army has its own standards above and beyond what Washington, D.C. mandates and states have no more jurisdiction than foreign countries do.

Yet some soldiers are reckless and risk their careers and among that group, many think Spice - synthetic marijuana - will be harder to detect. Social workers from the University of Washington have found that among active-duty Army personnel they surveyed, Spice is the most abused substance.

Magnetic devices like hard drives, magnetic random access memories (MRAMs), molecular magnets, and quantum computers depend on the manipulation of magnetic properties. In an atom, magnetism arises from the spin and orbital momentum of its electrons. 'Magnetic anisotropy' describes how an atom's magnetic properties depend on the orientation of the electrons' orbits relative to the structure of a material. It also provides directionality and stability to magnetization. Publishing in Science, researchers led by EPFL combine various experimental and computational methods to measure for the first time the energy needed to change the magnetic anisotropy of a single Cobalt atom.

In Europe, there is a rush to ban and label things regardless of information. In America, there is a movement to do the same. In Asia, it is open season on the public regarding bizarre supplements, alternative medicine and natural therapies.

Yet in many ways, Asians are healthier. That shows that everyone can be right in their claims when the data is so scattered and people who insist their idea will be a one-size-fits-all solution are not being evidence-based.

So, claims that more labels and symbols will improve public health may be true -  they haven't shown to be true in America but perhaps it just takes more time - but how to do that effectively is a mystery. When will people reach label fatigue?

Here is the chemical list of an organic egg.

An ancient kitten-sized predator is one of the smallest species reported in the extinct order Sparassodonta, which were carnivorous marsupials (metatherian mammals, anyway) native to South America lived in Bolivia about 13 million years ago.

The researchers can't name the new species because the specimen lacks well-preserved teeth, which are the only parts preserved in many of its close relatives.

The skull, which would have been a little less than 3 inches long if complete, shows the animal had a very short snout. A socket, or alveolus, in the upper jaw shows it had large, canines, that were round in cross-section much like those of a meat-eating marsupial, called the spotted-tailed quoll, found in Australia today, the researchers said.

When ovarian cancer spreads from the ovaries it almost always does so to a layer of fatty tissue that lines the gut. A new study has found that ovarian cancer cells are more aggressive on these soft tissues due to the mechanical properties of this environment. The finding is contrary to what is seen with other malignant cancer cells that seem to prefer stiffer tissues.

"What we found is that there are some cancer cells that respond to softness as opposed to stiffness," said Michelle Dawson, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "Ovarian cancer cells that are highly metastatic respond to soft environments by becoming more aggressive."

Proteins, those workhorses of the cell responsible for almost all biological functions, have to be adaptable and that means chain-like molecules must engage in an intricate three-dimensional conformation.

This process - protein folding - is one of the most important in biology. In the event of improper folding, proteins can't perform their duties and may even lump together in aggregates, which can lead to severe diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's.

To prevent that, specialized proteins, so-called chaperones, help other proteins to adopt their proper shape. 

If you ask rural people in the American east which is more damaging to the ecology, coyotes or deer, it may be a toss-up. But that doesn't mean it is a good idea for one to just take the other out.

In most states, deer population management also brings revenue benefits - hunting licenses and meat - but coyotes aren't hunted. They haven't been arrived that long. Coyotes -- Canis latrans -- have long inhabited the American West but are a relatively recent arrival to eastern North America, appearing first in the region in noticeable numbers in the 1970s. They have already become a significant source of deer mortality and most often prey on whitetail fawns in the earliest months of their lives.