Organic food has managed to wrap itself in both a health and ethical halo and a lot of the credit for that has to go to outstanding marketing and the work of trade groups that represent organic farmers. They have turned what was once a niche market focused on a different process into a $100 billion juggernaut where mothers chide other mothers as bad parents if they don't buy organic.

That will be taught in business classes for decades.

Weather patterns in a mysterious world beyond our solar system called
PSO J318.5-22
have been revealed for the first time. Layers of clouds, made up of hot dust and droplets of molten iron, have been detected on a planet-like object found 75 light years from Earth, researchers say. 

Findings from the study could improve scientists' ability to find out if conditions in far-off planets are capable of sustaining life, the team of astronomers suggests.

They used a telescope in increasingly-popular Chile (Hawaii and Arizona in the U.S. long ago declared white-collar astronomy and a mandated lack of light pollution to be environmentally hazardous) to study the weather systems in PSO J318.5-22, which is estimated to be around 20 million-years-old. 

Though we have an obesity crisis in the United States a disproportionate amount of time is spent worrying about food availability for the poor - even though the poor lead in obesity.

How can both be possible? The Great Recession still lingers with us, unemployment is stuck at 90 million people, and it's no surprise that was particularly hard on low-income families. When business declines, taxes rise and the government mandates even more costly benefits, that will hurt the poorest people, just like any increase in the costs of products does.

Having more children or having her fallopian tubes cut changes risk of different types of ovarian cancer to different levels, according to new research presented at the 2015 National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Cancer Conference.

Data was collected from more than 8,000 women with ovarian cancer as part of the UK Million Women Study. Researchers then examined the risk of the four most common types of ovarian cancer - serous, mucinous, endometrioid and clear cell tumors - in women with different childbearing patterns.

Chagas disease, the third most common parasitic infection in the world, affects approximately 7.5 million people, mostly in Latin America. To help reduce outbreaks of this disease in their countries, the United States and Mexican governments should implement a range of programs as well as fund research for the development of Chagas vaccines and treatments, according to a new policy brief.

In what might be a new breakthrough for the spider-control field, researchers have found that oil-based pesticides are more effective than water-based pesticides at killing the contents of brown widow spider egg sacs.

This finding is important because trying to control adult spiders without controlling their eggs is like plucking dandelions without taking out their roots.

The body's circadian clocks coordinate behaviors like eating and sleeping, as well as physiological activity like metabolism, with the Earth's 24-hour light-dark cycle. There's a master clock in the brain, as well as peripheral clocks located in individual organs. When genetics, environment or behavior disrupt the synchrony of these clocks, metabolic disorders can develop.

The DNA in our cells is folded into millions of small packets, like beads on a string, allowing two-meter linear DNA genomes to fit into a nucleus of only about 0.01 mm in diameter.

However, these molecular beads, called nucleosomes, render DNA 'unreadable'. They thus need to be temporarily displaced to allow genes to be copied ('transcribed') into the messages that are used to make proteins. How cells ensure appropriate access to 'promoter' DNA, the regions where gene transcription begins, is still poorly understood.

I got many comments on last week's Nibiru article from some very scared people. They needed a lot of reassuring that it was indeed a hoax and not real, and brought up many topics to discuss such as lens flares, hoaxes, double sun videos, rare sun mirages, and the status of the astronomical search for various versions of planet X. Why are astronomers so sure that Nibiru is nonsense?

Nothing is more frustrating that watching that hourglass in the center of your screen while you wait for your computer to load a program or access the data you need.  

Well, maybe status bars are worse. Those used to be a culture war in the political science community.

A team from the Universities of Sheffield and Leeds may have found a way to speed things up: sound.  The paper in Applied Physics Letters finds that certain types of sound waves can move data quickly, using minimal power.