March 16, 2016--The percentage of Americans who reported using marijuana in the past year more than doubled between 2001-2002 and 2012-2013, and the increase in marijuana use disorders during that time was nearly as large, according to a new study in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The research also showed that 2.5 percent of adults--nearly 6 million people--experienced marijuana use disorder in the past year, while 6.3 percent had met the diagnostic criteria for the disorder at some point in their lives.

The collaborative study was carried out by scientists at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University Medical Center, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health.

WASHINGTON, DC -- The repeated storms which battered Europe's Atlantic coastline during the winter of 2013/14 were the most energetic in almost seven decades, new research has shown.

They were part of a growing trend in stormy conditions which scientists say has the potential to dramatically change the equilibrium state of beaches along the western side of the continent, leading to permanent changes in beach gradient, coastal alignment and nearshore bar position.

The saint's legend speaks of a king who died a dramatic death in battle outside the church in Uppsala, Sweden, where he had just celebrated mass. But what can modern science tell us about his remains? A joint research project headed by Uppsala University now reveals more of the health condition of Saint Erik, what he looked like, where he lived and what the circumstances of his death were.

No contemporary sources mention Erik Jedvardsson, the Swedish king who was later sainted. The only account of his life is the saint's legend, in its preserved form written in the 1290's. Such legends are often unreliable. The Erik legend is, however, based on an older legend which has been lost, and this longer legend may have been much older.

Previous analyses of the hominins from Sima de los Huesos in 2013 showed that their maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA was distantly related to Denisovans, extinct relatives of Neandertals in Asia. This was unexpected since their skeletal remains carry Neandertal-derived features. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have since worked on sequencing nuclear DNA from fossils from the cave, a challenging task as the extremely old DNA is degraded to very short fragments. The results now show that the Sima de los Huesos hominins were indeed early Neandertals. Neandertals may have acquired different mitochondrial genomes later, perhaps as the result of gene flow from Africa.

Future Science Group (FSG) today announced the publication of a new article in Future Science OA, reporting data that explore the effect of frailty on the natural history of diabetes and the implications it will have for therapeutic plans in older people.

New doctor's orders: No earbuds, no music, and no watching TV while eating.

Researchers at Brigham Young University and Colorado State University have found that the noise your food makes while you're eating can have a significant effect on how much food you eat.

The "Crunch Effect," as they call it, suggests you're likely to eat less if you're more conscious of the sound your food makes while you're eating. Therefore, watching loud TV or listening to loud music while eating can mask eating sounds that keep you in check.

Washington, D.C., March 15, 2016 - Sometimes, distance can lend a new perspective to a problem. For Japanese researchers studying protein crystal growth, that distance was 250 miles up -- the altitude at which the International Space Station (ISS) orbits the Earth. To better isolate the growth of protein crystals from the effects of gravity, the group of Katsuo Tsukamoto in Tohoku University's Department of Earth and Planetary Science in Sendai, Japan, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency grew crystals in a specially-designed chamber onboard the ISS.

There is a war on working mothers that shouldn't be waged. It is a war that seeks to make breastfeeding moms better parents, while subtly criticizing moms who use formula, which will invariably impact career and poor women most.

And there is zero evidence that "natural" is better, it is just clever marketing that caters to wealthy elites. 

Biology lessons teach us that the brain is divided into separate areas, each of which processes a specific sense. But findings to be published in eLife show we can supercharge it to be more flexible.

Scientists at the Jagiellonian University in Poland taught Braille to sighted individuals and found that learning such a complex tactile task activates the visual cortex, when you'd only expect it to activate the tactile one.

"The textbooks tell us that the visual cortex processes visual tasks while the tactile cortex, called the somatosensory cortex, processes tasks related to touch," says lead author Marcin Szwed from Jagiellonian University.

Shifting winds may explain why long-term fluctuations in North Atlantic sea surface temperatures have no apparent influence on Europe's wintertime temperatures. The findings, published in Nature Communications, could also have implications for how Europe's climate will evolve amid global warming.