If you are toughing out harsh winter weather, snow can be a relief. It's a respite from biting winds and subzero temperatures.

But winter and spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has declined in recent years, putting plants and animals that depend on the space beneath the snow to survive the blustery chill of winter at risk.

An estimated 5 percent of the U.S. population has restless legs syndrome, a disruptive, overwhelming nocturnal urge to move the legs even while sleeping, which can lead to many sleepless nights.

Why do patients with restless legs syndrome  still have insomnia when the condition is treated successfully with medication?

Intelligent Design is often presented as a view that runs counter to evolutionary theory.  Whether it be the concept of natural selection or ideas about speciation, Intelligent Design (ID) purports to reconcile the observed environment from the perspective of an intelligent ordering system.

Concepts like "irreducible complexity" to examples of finding a watch or a tornado spontaneously assembling a 747 in a junkyard.  All these images are invoked by Intelligent Design as an argument against evolution.

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

Bob Geldof, former singer with The Boomtown Rats, is better known today for his work with poor people. Long after it stopped being fashionable, he has continued to help starving people in Ethiopia.

It's not the only way he is unfashionable - so is his old-school liberalism, which doesn't care about labels or circling the wagons for Big Tent left-wing causes or being against anyone on the other side by default.  When he spoke nicely about George W. Bush in 2003, it was stunning because we were all told to hate George Bush. Liberals in America were not allowed to say nice things about the man or the pitchforks and "neo-con" labels came out.

One Small Step - Two Small Strips 
 ( Or Maybe Three )


The news that Neil Armstrong's EKG is up for auction has been reported across the world.  Having more than a passing interest in how language is used, I was looking at the different ways that writers have dealt with this story when the article by PC mag caught my eye.  The image they posted was not the same as the one from RR Auction.

Combining Medicare's hospital, physician, and prescription drug coverage with private supplemental coverage into one health plan could save the government and seniors $180 billion over a decade, according to a new analysis from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and advocacy group The Commonwealth Fund. 

Under the proposed plan, called "Medicare Essential," Medicare costs would be $63 billion lower between 2014 and 2023, with total premium and out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries estimated to be 17 percent to 40 percent lower than current costs.

Species of gigantic animals that once roamed Australia were long gone by the time people arrived, a major review of the available evidence has concluded.

The research challenges the claim that humans were primarily responsible for the demise of the megafauna in a proposed "extinction window" between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, and points the finger instead at climate change.

The Black Sea sediment record has a terrific variety of past plankton species that left behind their genetic makeup - the plankton paleome.

The semi-isolated Black Sea is highly sensitive to climate driven environmental changes, and the underlying sediments represent high-resolution archives of past continental climate and concurrent hydrologic changes in the basin. The brackish Black Sea is currently receiving salty Mediterranean waters via the narrow Strait of Bosphorus as well as freshwater from rivers and via precipitation.

A roughly 3.5-mile high Martian mound  known as Mount Sharp is not evidence of a massive lake but might be the result of the Red Planet's famously dusty atmosphere, a new analysis has found. If correct, the research dilutes expectations that the mound holds evidence of a large body of water and ideas about past habitability.

You've seen it on television; a rich, older man who supports a younger, attractive spouse. And it happens in real life, but it's rare.

Instead, a new analysis by economists has found that people married to much younger or much older mates have lower average earnings, lower cognitive abilities, are less educated and even less attractive than couples of similar ages.