In a post-apocalyptic future, what might happen to life if humans left the scene? After all, humans are very likely to disappear long before the sun expands into a red giant and exterminates all living things from the Earth.

Assuming that we don’t extinguish all other life as we disappear (an unlikely feat in spite of our unique propensity for driving extinction), history tells us to expect some pretty fundamental changes when humans are no longer the planet’s dominant animal species.

Dr. Sébastien Jacquemont, a geneticist at the University of Montreal, has correlated genetics to intelligence. "We have just discovered, for example, that a missing copy of a region in chromosome 16 results in a 25-point intelligence quotient (IQ) drop in carriers. Addition of a copy in the same genomic region results in an approximate 16-point drop. Strangely enough, even if carriers show much differentiated sets of symptoms - and sometimes no symptoms at all - the specific effect of these two mutations seems to remain the same."

Bullying is a common technique to gain power or prestige, and has been for as long as humans and other animals have existed. It can take many forms. School yard tactics, like taking lunch money, have grown into Internet campaigns, such as tormenting kids on Facebook, and it has even become organized movements, like the dark-money funded group SourceWatch attacking scientists and pro-science groups for their donors.

A new review article seeks to outline roles and recommendations for peers, parents, schools and new media platforms to stop bullying. 

Epigenetics is spreading its wings out to the painkiller world, at least in an animal model. Of course, it is well-known that just about everything has been linked to causing cancer in rats. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has studied hundreds and hundreds of compounds and only one substance has been placed into group 4 (probably not carcinogenic) so if your name gets mentioned in a meeting, you are going to be found to cause cancer.

So don't worry just yet. Unless you are raising money for an environmental group or work at a law group, there is a huge gas between rats and humans. 

Bo Nash is 38. He lives in Arlington, Texas, where he’s a technology director for a textbook publisher. He has a wife and child. And he’s 5’10” and 245 lbs – which means he is classed as obese.

In an effort to lose weight, Nash uses an app to record the calories he consumes and a Fitbit band to track the energy he expends. These tools bring an apparent precision: Nash can quantify the calories in each cracker crunched and stair climbed. But when it comes to weight gain, he finds that not all calories are equal. How much weight he gains or loses seems to depend less on the total number of calories, and more on where the calories come from and how he consumes them. The unit, he says, has a “nebulous quality to it”.

Thousands of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed students recently found out whether they had been accepted into Australian medical schools.

Selection is a highly competitive process, requiring an impressive combination of high secondary school results (ATAR/GPA), high results on various medical admissions tests (UMAT/GAMSAT), cogent personal statements and/or performance in multiple mini interviews.

Surgeons removing a malignant brain tumor don’t want to leave cancerous material behind, but they also need to protect healthy brain matter and minimize neurological harm. Once the patient’s skull is open, there’s no time to send tissue samples to a pathology lab to be frozen, sliced, stained, mounted on slides and investigated under a bulky microscope in order distinguish between cancerous and normal brain cells.

A handheld, miniature microscope could allow surgeons to “see” at a cellular level in the operating room and determine where to stop cutting. The researchers hope that after testing the microscope’s performance as a cancer- screening tool, it can be introduced into surgeries or other clinical procedures within the next 2 to 4 years.

Athens, Ga. - If environmentalists want to protect fragile ecosytems from landing in the hands of developers--in the U.S. and around the globe--they should team up with ecotourists, according to a University of Georgia study published in the Journal of Ecotourism.

Environmentalists often fear that tourists will trample all over sensitive natural resource areas, but tourism may bring the needed and only economic incentives to help drive conservation, said study co-author Bynum Boley, an assistant professor in UGA's Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources. Ecotourism and natural resource conservation already have a mutually beneficial relationship that is ideal for creating a sustainable partnership.

People bereaved by the sudden death of a friend or family member are 65% more likely to attempt suicide if the deceased died by suicide than if they died by natural causes. This brings the absolute risk up to 1 in 10, reveals new UCL research funded by the Medical Research Council.

The researchers studied 3,432 UK university staff and students aged 18-40 who had been bereaved, to examine the specific impacts associated with bereavement by suicide. The results are published in BMJ Open.

As well as the increased risk of suicide attempt, those bereaved by suicide were also 80% more likely to drop out of education or work. In total, 8% of the people bereaved by suicide had dropped out of an educational course or a job since the death.

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Expanding lung cancer screening to include people who quit smoking more than 15 years ago could detect more cases and further reduce associated mortality, according to a study by Mayo Clinic researchers published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology.