How much time and effort do you spend chewing?

Although you probably enjoy a few leisurely meals every day, chances are that you spend very little time and muscular effort chewing your food. That kind of easy eating is very unusual. For perspective, our closest relatives, chimpanzees, spend almost half their day chewing, and with much greater force.

When and how did eating become so easy? And what were its consequences?

Using natural gas instead of coal or oil in electricity generation could have a significant effect on net carbon emissions into the atmosphere. By contrast, the benefits of using natural gas instead of petroleum products to drive vehicles are negligible, according to research published in the International Journal of Global Warming.

ESA astronaut Tim Peake took this image circling Earth 400 km up in the International Space Station. He commented: “Sometimes looking down on Earth at night can be kinda spooky.”

Video games are a favorite activity of children, yet any affect on their health is often perceived to be negative.

A new paper in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology looked for an association between the amount of time spent playing video games and children's mental health and cognitive and social skills, and found that playing video games may have positive effects on young children. 

A substantial proportion of women in countries around the world do not stay in health facilities for long enough after giving birth, which could result in them receiving inadequate postnatal care, according to an analysis of survey results by the London School of Hygiene&Tropical Medicine, which compiled and analyzed information from databases and health surveys to look at the length of time women stay in health facilities after childbirth in 92 countries, and found wide variation.

Hydrolyzed infant milk formula doesn't protect against allergic or autoimmune disorders, finds a new study.

Allergic and autoimmune disease diagnoses have increased in prevalence in many countries and are leading causes of chronic illness among young people. Some studies suggest that early dietary exposures in infancy, such as intact cows' milk protein in the form of infant formula, can increase the risk of these diseases, while others say early exposure is necessary to prevent allergies.

Los Angeles, CA (March 09, 2016) A new study finds that gender stereotypes are as strong today as they were 30 years ago, and that people are even more likely now to believe that men avoid "traditional" female roles. This research is out today in Psychology of Women Quarterly (PWQ), a journal from SAGE Publishing.

"Changes in the activities and representation of women and men in society have unquestionably occurred since the early 1980s; however, those changes apparently have not been sufficient to alter strongly held and seemingly functional beliefs about the basic social category of gender," commented researchers Elizabeth L. Haines, Kay Deaux and Nicole Lofaro.

As the deadly bat disease called white-nose syndrome continues to spread across North America, scientists are studying bats in China to understand how they are able to survive infections with the same fungus that has wiped out millions of North American bats.

Football teams have been wearing numbers since Arsenal experimented with putting their players in numbered shirts in 1928 (it didn’t bring them much luck – they lost 3-2 to Sheffield Wednesday). But it was Manchester United that made the number seven shirt iconic by putting their best players in it – perhaps most famously David Beckham, who said:

Are the sexual interests and behaviors of Quebec residents abnormal? 

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), sexual interests fall into two categories: normal (normophilic) and anomalous (paraphilic). But a new survey finds that a number of legal sexual interests and behaviors considered anomalous in psychiatry are actually common in the general population. So they may be abnormal, yet they are still common. Which is yet another way DSM-5 has suspect value, even as a glossary of psychology.