Friends of the Earth, an activism group generally devoted to impeding science and progress, is excited that the Texas Clean Energy Project, a carbon capture and sequestration facility in Texas, has support from the Department of Energy that is set to expire.

Having analyzed the data collected for more than three decades, scientists managed to show that the effects of climate changes in the Arctic may come out on a completely different continent, a few thousand kilometers away from the Arctic ice. One of the authors, Eldar Rahimberdiev, researcher at the Biological faculty of MSU, says that the work is unique, as earlier scholars did not consider these problems so complex.

Although ski season is behind us, serious skiers are already looking ahead to next season and searching for ways to shave split-seconds off their race times. Now scientists may have a new way to help -- perhaps in time for the next Winter Olympics. One team has determined how the microscopic texture of the bottoms of skis could affect their speed, depending on snow temperature. Their study appears in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Why is the WebMD website so successful? Last week, John Oliver ridiculed them for promoting every suspect association between anything and cancer, without any analysis or critical thinking. 

A new paper paper in the journal Communication Research may provide some answers. They are publishing churnalism and advertorials about science and health, and that is far more effective than the numerous advertisements they carry.

I am told by a TOTEM manager that this is public news and so it can be blogged about - so here I would like to explain a rather cunning plan that the TOTEM and the CMS collaborations have put together to enhance the possibilities of a discovery, and a better characterization, of the particle that everybody hopes is real, the 750 GeV resonance seen in photon pairs data by ATLAS and CMS in their 2015 data.

Diagnoses of celiac disease (CD), an autoimmune disease, are increasing, no real surprise after not one but two bestselling food books based on suspect studies claimed wheat is poison.

Psychologically, women may not like much competition, according to a female psychologist, and that may account for inequality in academia and the work force.

If that is true, though, why is psychology 70 percent women? There is just as much competition, it just isn't men. It may be that because psychology has a smaller monetary reward, women feel more communal than competitive, according to Dr. Kathrin Hanek, the study's lead author. 

EAST LANSING, Mich. - A rare, severe form of pulmonary hypertension, which up until now, has only been classified as a human lung disease, has also been discovered in dogs according to a Michigan State University study.

"Our research is the first to document the existence of pulmonary veno-occlusive disease, or PVOD, in dogs," said Kurt Williams, the lead author of the study and an expert in respiratory pathology in MSU's College of Veterinary Medicine. "PVOD is considered one of the most severe forms of pulmonary hypertension."

The study is published in the journal Veterinary Pathology.

A diabetes medication described in some studies as an effective treatment for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) works no better than a placebo, report researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, after conducting the first randomized, double-blind, controlled clinical trial of sitagliptin, an oral antihyperglycemic marketed by Merck & Co. under the name Januvia.

In experiments involving a simulation of the human esophagus and stomach, researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule and, steered by external magnetic fields, crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound.

The new work, which the researchers are presenting this week at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, builds on a long sequence of papers on origami robots from the research group of Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.