RICHLAND, Wash. – Killer whales and other marine mammals likely hear sonar signals more than we've known.

That's because commercially available sonar systems, which are designed to create signals beyond the range of hearing of such animals, also emit signals known to be within their hearing range, scientists have discovered.

The sound is likely very soft and audible only when the animals are within a few hundred meters of the source, say the authors of a new study. The signals would not cause any actual tissue damage, but it's possible that they affect the behavior of some marine mammals, which rely heavily on sound to communicate, navigate, and find food.

Physically active kids who spend a lot of time outdoors are not only healthier, they have a stronger sense of self-fulfillment and purpose than those who don't - and more spirituality too.

In the Journal of the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture paper, children who played outside five to 10 hours per week said they felt a spiritual connection with the earth and felt their role is to protect it.

There are three simple family-oriented rules of thumb to overcome childhood obesity.

They basically involve limit setting to address the brain's "get more" drive strengthened through habitual over-consumption of temptations including highly caloric processed food, hyper-reality media and electronics, as well as excessive sitting. His 3 "rules" of living promote physical and mental health for children and parents for both treatment and prevention. 

They are below, though the official - and slightly weirder - terms for them are farther down:

1) Limit highly caloric processed food
2) Limit media and electronics
3) Sit a lot less

Kristopher Kaliebe, MD, Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at

You won't see these in a Whole Foods any time soon, but science has a way to improve the microbiological safety of meat; antimicrobial agents incorporated into edible films. As a bonus, they seal in flavor, freshness and color, according to researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

Using films made of pullulan -- an edible, mostly tasteless, transparent polymer produced by the fungus Aureobasidium pulluns -- researchers evaluated the effectiveness of films containing essential oils derived from rosemary, oregano and nanoparticles against foodborne pathogens associated with meat and poultry.

While smokers are the primary addictive personality it remains okay to demonize, obesity is not far behind. 

And if smokers tried to quit before and gained weight, they are less likely to try again, according to scholars at Penn State College of Medicine. 

Weight gain is a predictable occurrence for smokers who have recently quit. Within the first year after quitting, people  gain from eight to 14 pounds on average. Some smokers report that they keep smoking simply because they do not want to gain weight from quitting. 

In the 1950s and 1960s, pregnant women with morning sickness were often prescribed thalidomide. Shortly after the medicine was released on the market, a reported 10,000 infants were born with an extreme form of the rare congenital phocomelia syndrome, which caused death in 50 percent of cases and severe physical and mental disabilities in others.

Although various factors are now known to cause phocomelia, the prominent roots of the disease can be found in the use of the drug thalidomide.  It ignited the anti-pharmaceutical cultural firestorm that still burns today.

Rapidly aging mice fed an experimental drug lived more than four times longer than a control group, and their lungs and vascular system were protected from accelerated aging, according to a new study.

The reason is a protein's key role in cell and physiological aging. The experimental drug inhibits the protein's effect and prolonged the lifespan in a mouse model of accelerated aging. 

This is a completely different target and different drug than anything else being investigated for potential effects in prolonging life and the experimental drug is in the early stages of testing, they note in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Aquatic algae can sense and adapt to changing light conditions in lakes and oceans, making them able to use a wide range of color, according to a new paper.

Phytochromes are the eyes of a plant, allowing it to detect changes in the color, intensity, and quality of light so that the plant can react and adapt. Typically about 20 percent of a plant's genes are regulated by phytochromes and the phytochromes use bilin pigments that are structurally related to chlorophyll, the molecule that plants use to harvest light and use it to turn carbon dioxide and water into food.

In a Twitter age, one where mainstream media desperately needs to keep people watching and reading, every event is magnified. A tropical storm that hit New York City was transformed into a Superstorm and a drought in the West is a harbinger of global warming that will crack the planet.

Star Wars Day is May 4th so you are probably wondering how you would build deflector shields in case the US government is worried about turtles on its former nuclear testing grounds and thinks your cows will harm the ecosystem and sends a Death Star after you.

You're in luck; not only are they scientifically feasible, the principle behind them is already used here on Earth.

If you're too young to have seen the original, and missed the flawed prequels, you needn't feel left out - in almost every science-fiction scenario, spaceships are protected by a shield defense system that deflects enemy laser fire.