As college students have made their way back to campus this month, many also return to the habits, some good, some bad, that dorm-life promotes. A new survey finds that adults under 25, including high school graduates and college students, are more likely to rate hookah and e-cigarettes as safer than cigarettes, when compared to 25 to 34-year-olds, according to a paper in Health Education&Behavior.

Natural American Spirit has discovered how to gain market share; tout the organic, all-natural status of its product.

It must be healthier, right?

Not when it comes to cigarettes, but it has been very good strategy for the company to do what organic food and soap corporations have done so well - frame the discussion so that their process seems physically and ethically superior to "conventional." 

Despite the glitz and glory of Usain Bolt’s comeback victories and Jessica Ennis-Hill’s heptathlon triumph at the World Championships, 2015 is shaping up as quite the annus horribilis for athletics.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) announces a determination of non-regulated status for a genetically engineered (GE) potato variety developed by J.R. Simplot Company (Simplot) called Innate, which has been engineered for late blight resistance, low-acrylamide potential, reduced black spot bruising, and lowered reducing sugars. 

The determination will be effective upon publication of the Federal Register notice announcing the decision on September 2, 2015, they wrote.

Nina Fedoroff, molecular biologist and former Science and Technology Adviser to Condoleezza Rice and then Hillary Clinton, says that genetic modification (GM) is the most critical technology in agriculture for meeting the challenges of feeding a growing global population. Fedoroff warns of the detrimental influence of politics and misinformation on the safety of GM crops and in contrast to anti-science marketing campaigns by groups like Greenpeace and NRDC that, "GM crops are arguably the safest new crops ever introduced into the human and animal food chains."

Testing the saliva of healthy older people for the level of the stress hormone cortisol may help identify individuals who should be screened for problems with thinking skills, according to a study published in Neurology. The study found that people with higher levels of cortisol in the evening were more likely to have a smaller total brain volume and to perform worse on tests of thinking and memory skills.

Could the sperm harpoon the egg to facilitate fertilization? That's the intriguing possibility raised by the University of Virginia School of Medicine's discovery that a protein within the head of the sperm forms spiky filaments, suggesting that these tiny filaments may lash together the sperm and its target.

The finding, 14 years in the making, has earned the cover of the scientific journal Andrology. It represents a significant step forward in the fine dissection of the protein architecture of the sperm's acrosomal matrix, an organelle in the sperm head, and suggests a new hypothesis concerning what happens during fertilization.

By: Michael Greshko, Inside Science – Some filmmakers really know how to get into their audience’s heads, new research suggests.

Last month, a team led by Matt Bezdek, a cognitive psychologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, found that suspenseful movies -- including several by director Alfred Hitchcock -- actively limit the brain’s awareness of the visual periphery. The findings provide greater insight into how movies let us temporarily escape the real world.

A new device transforms paralysis victims’ breath into words.

Billed as a tool to help bring back the art of conversation for sufferers of severe paralysis and loss of speech, the prototype analyses changes in breathing patterns and converts ‘breath signals’ into words using pattern recognition software and an analogue-to-digital converter. A speech synthesizer then reads the words aloud.

The Augmentative and Alternate Communication (AAC) device is designed for patients with complete or partial loss of voluntary muscle control who don’t have the ability to make purposeful movements such as sniffing or blinking – gestures which previous AAC devices have come to rely upon.

Before gluten sensitivity was a running joke in popular culture, medical marijuana held the preeminent position as easy humor fodder. The reason was simple: It did nothing for glaucoma, beyond the placebo range, and though the vast majority of clinical pain patients were women, 75 percent of the "medical marijuana" cardholders were men.