A new way to store methane could speed the development of cleaner-burning natural gas-powered cars that don't require the high pressures or cold temperatures of today's compressed or liquefied natural gas vehicles.

Natural gas is cleaner-burning than gasoline, and today there are more than 150,000 compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles on the road in the U.S., most of them trucks and buses. But until manufacturers can find a way to pack more methane into a tank at lower pressures and temperatures, allowing for a greater driving range and less hassle at the pump, passenger cars are unlikely to adopt natural gas as a fuel.

A new study concludes that even if calories are the same and no weight is lost, children are still healthier with added sugar - and the author say changes in high cholesterol and blood pressure, are noticeable in as little as 10 days.

Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of conditions -- increased blood pressure, high blood glucose level, excess body fat around the waist, and abnormal cholesterol levels -- that occur together and increase risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Other diseases associated with metabolic syndrome, such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes, now occur in children -- disorders previously unknown in the pediatric population.

Managing money can be difficult at any age but for older adults, changes in physical condition and life circumstances can lead to changes for the worse in financial behavior, putting their well-being in danger.

Now those changes have been given a name: age-associated financial vulnerability. 

The authors define the condition as "a pattern of financial behavior that places an older adult at substantial risk for a considerable loss of resources such that dramatic changes in quality of life would result." To be considered AAFV, this behavior also must be a marked change from the kind of financial decisions a person made in younger years.

Scientists have deciphered maternal genetic material from two babies buried together at an Alaskan campsite 11,500 years ago and found the infants had different mothers and were the northernmost known kin to two lineages of Native Americans found farther south throughout North and South America.

By showing that both genetic lineages lived so far north so long ago, the study supports the "Beringian standstill model." It says that Native Americans descended from people who migrated from Asia to Beringia - the vast Bering land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska - and then spent up to 10,000 years in Beringia before moving rapidly into the Americas beginning at least 15,000 years ago.

Giants once roamed the earth. Oceans teemed with ninety-foot-long whales, huge land animals ate vast quantities of food and, yes, deposited vast quantities of poop.

A new study shows that these whales and outsized land mammals, as well as seabirds and migrating fish, played a vital role in keeping the planet fertile by transporting nutrients from ocean depths and spreading them across seas, up rivers, and deep inland, even to mountaintops. 

However, massive declines and extinctions of many of these animals has deeply damaged this planetary nutrient recycling system, a team of scientists reported October 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers have found that a long-known tumor suppressor, whose mechanism of holding cell growth in check has remained murky for over 40 years, works in part by keeping the cell's energy metabolism behaving in grown-up fashion.

Tumor suppressors are protein molecules that serve as natural "brakes" on cell proliferation to prevent the formation of malignant tumors. Understanding how these protective proteins work may be a key to developing targeted cancer treatments.

Psychology has not kept pace with science because symptom-based diagnosis stopped being used 50 years ago in medicine yet psychologists still rely on it. As evidence,the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has become 'The Bible' of psychiatry because it diagnoses depression when patients tick off a certain number of symptoms on the DSM checklist.
But the National Institutes of Mental Health no longer use it as anything more than a glossary because of controversy and maneuvering (e.g. a desire to get more and more disorders covered by insurance), 

It is generally recognized that our physical fitness and our mental fitness are linked, especially as we get older, but how does being physically fit affect our aging brains?

Neuroimaging studies, in which the activity of different parts of the brain can be visualized, have led to hypotheses but no study has directly linked brain activation with both mental and physical performance. A new paper in NeuroImage, led by Dr. Hideaki Soya from the University of Tsukuba in Japan, sees a direct relationship between brain activity, brain function and physical fitness in a group of older Japanese men. They found that the fitter men performed better mentally than the less fit men, by using parts of their brains in the same way as in their youth.

A new study has found that nearly half of camels in parts of Kenya have been infected by the virus that causes Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and calls for further research into the role they might play in the transmission of this emerging disease to humans.

MERS was first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and there is currently no vaccine or specific treatment available. To date, it has infected 1,595 people in more than 20 countries and caused 571 deaths. Although the majority of human cases of MERS have been attributed to human-to-human infections, camels are likely to be a major reservoir host for the virus and an animal source of MERS infection in humans.

Researchers have discovered how a protein from malaria could some day help stop cancer.

While exploring why pregnant women are particularly susceptible to malaria, they found that the mosquito-borne parasite that causes malaria also produces a protein that binds to a particular type of sugar molecule in the placenta.