We have a biological clock related to sleep cycles and a new paper says we have weight loss cycles related to behavior; people are going to gain weight on the weekend so if they lose more during the week, that weight loss cycle will result in better health.

Dr. Brian Wansink of the marketing department at Cornell University, in collaboration with researchers from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Tampere University of Technology, looked into the impact that the seven-days-a-week human cycle has on weight.

For the past eight years, the Amazon rain forest has gotten greener as the weather seemingly got hotter and drier each year from June to October. 

Limited rainfall didn't prevent thriving vegetation, which really put a damper on the simplistic 'turn one climate knob and all of our issues are solved' narrative. 

Evolutionary biology sounds exciting - there wouldn't be any movies on the SyFy Channel without Gatoroids and Sharknados and other feats of life science run amok - but in reality you are going to spend a lot of time paying your dues watching sponges in mid-sneeze before you get to create an epidemic or a giant monster.

Sneezing sponges? Isn't that a little far-fetched, even for the network that brought us "Arachnoquake"? No, actually the sponge thing is real, and a new paper points to Porifera sneezing as evidence for a sensory organ in one of the most basic multicellular organisms on Earth, even though it doesn't even have a nervous system to interpret sensory information.

Why do men and women have different heights? Why do people have different predispositions to BMI, blood pressure and lipid levels?

Chromosome X is one of the two sex-determining chromosomes and researchers from the University of Helsinki set out to analyze the commonly occurring genetic variation in chromosome X  to find genetic factors that could explain individual differences in various traits.

Hundreds of genetic variants having an effect on these traits have already been identified but the X chromosome has not been studied in most of  previous studies. 25,000 Northern European individuals later, the researchers say they have some answers. 

How are accurate are the world's most advanced weather forecasting models?

They perform okay, at least when it comes to predicting the very near future.  Two University of Iowa researchers, David Lavers and Gabriele Villarini, evaluated rainfall forecasts from eight different global numerical weather prediction (NWP) models and their ability to predict the Sept. 9th-16th, 2013 extreme rainfall that caused severe flooding in Boulder, Colorado.

During September of 2013, Boulder County and surrounding areas experienced severe flooding and heavy rain resulting in fatalities, the loss of homes and businesses, and the declaration of a major disaster.

United States dominance in science and technology declined  during the last decade as several Asian nations rapidly increased their innovation capacities.

According to a new report, The 2014 volume of Science and Engineering Indicators prepared by NSF's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), the major Asian economies, taken together, now perform a larger share of global R&D than the U.S., and China performs nearly as much of the world's high-tech manufacturing as the U.S.

Symmetry isn't always good. When we look at human faces, the most symmetrical, where one half is mirrored to the other, are less attractive than faces that show some distinction.

And it isn't just culture. A study in brains found that too much symmetry is also bad. Fish that have symmetric brains show defects in processing information about sights and smells, according to a new paper
in Current Biology. 

It's widely believed that the left and right sides of the brain have slightly different roles in cognition and in regulating behavior, but whether or not these asymmetries actually matter for the efficient functioning of the brain is unknown

Researchers stray from the usual heteronormative parameters in a new take on determining the relationship between love and sex.  They collected data from an Internet-based survey of almost 25,000 gay and bisexual men residing in the United States who were members of online websites facilitating social or sexual interactions with men. 

The survey results determined that nearly all (92.6 percent) of the men whose most recent sexual event occurred with a relationship partner indicated being in love with the partner at the time they had sex. So experiences of love among people are far more similar than different, regardless of sexual orientation.  

Last year, a group of researchers created a correlation between the migration patterns of ocean salmon and the Earth's magnetic field, suggesting it may help explain how the fish can navigate across thousands of miles of water to find their river of origin.

A new review doesn't add any value to supplements but at least it shows that people who spend money on supplements are more inclined to be developing a healthier lifestyle overall.

The review by  Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) consultant Annette Dickinson, Ph.D., and CRN's senior vice president, scientific and regulatory affairs, Duffy MacKay, N.D., only covered 20 articles, and those were all surveys anyway, so it's no surprise they found what they set out to find, that "overall, the evidence suggests that users of dietary supplements are seeking wellness and are consciously adopting a variety of lifestyle habits that they consider to contribute to healthy living."