There is a dark undercurrent to Indiana's school culture, according to a recent statement, and it's created a secret smuggling web where young children acquire and trade illegal items.

The good news: The illegal items aren't marijuana or heroin.

The strange news: It's salt.

Parents go to great lengths to ensure the health and well-being of their developing offspring. The favor, however, may not always be returned.

Dramatic research has shown that during pregnancy, cells of the fetus often migrate through the placenta, taking up residence in many areas of the mother's body, where their influence may benefit or undermine maternal health.

The presence of fetal cells in maternal tissue is known as fetal microchimerism. The term alludes to the chimeras of ancient Greek myth--composite creatures built from different animal parts, like the goat-lion-serpent depicted in an Etruscan bronze sculpture.

If you are a hunter and accidentally shoot an endangered eagle, you could go to jail and you will certainly have a criminal record. If you are a wind turbine company, you kill 100 eagles a year and pay a token fine.  An estimated 75 to 110 golden eagles die at a wind-power generation operation in Altamont, California each year. That is about one eagle for every 8 megawatts of energy produced yet no one is in Federal prison. 

We can be concerned about erosion due to man-made causes but it is nothing like what nature will randomly do in a single year, without ever once consulting Natural Resources Defense Council or other industry-funded groups.

The historic September 2013 storm that triggered widespread flooding across Colorado's Front Range eroded the equivalent of hundreds, or even as much as 1,000 years worth of accumulated sediment from the foothills west of Boulder, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered. The findings in Geology suggest that erosion may not always be a slow and steady process, like due to housing or shifts in vegetation, but rather can occur in sudden, rapid bursts due to extreme weather events such as hundred- and thousand-year storms.

While past research on the question has found otherwise, a new study by Defense and Veterans Affairs researchers suggests that women in the military are at no greater risk than men for developing posttraumatic stress disorder, given similar experiences--including combat.

The study involved active-duty troops and veterans who are part of the Millennium Cohort Study. That effort has more than 200,000 participants in all and the new PTSD study included more than 2,300 pairs of men and women who were matched based on an array of variables--including combat exposure--and followed about seven years, on average.

Ongoing developments in stem cell science mean that researchers often have no idea how, one year down the line, they will use specimens of human biological material.

But when a scientist takes a swab of your saliva, a sample of your blood or a piece of your skin to research a particular disease, how do you know that it’s going to be used for the intended purpose? And when it is used for research in a different condition, can you take any action? This is where informed consent comes in.

Perhaps you saw the news recently about astronauts in the International Space Station eating their first home grown lettuce? It's just a beginning, but in the future, could they grow all their own food and get all their oxygen from plants?

Toronto researchers have discovered that a single molecular event in our cells could hold the key to how we evolved to become the smartest animal on the planet.

Benjamin Blencowe, a professor in the University of Toronto's Donnelly Centre and Banbury Chair in Medical Research, and his team have uncovered how a small change in a protein called PTBP1 can spur the creation of neurons - cells that make the brain - that could have fuelled the evolution of mammalian brains to become the largest and most complex among vertebrates.

One day, it might be possible to detect the spread of life among the stars through panspermia--a hypothetical process of life distributed throughout the Milky Way by asteroids, comets, and even spacecraft. Henry Lin and Abraham Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics propose, “If future surveys detect biosignatures in the atmospheres of exoplanets,” it ought to be possible to detect the spread of life between stars even without knowing how life spread from host star to host star. That is, we probably wouldn’t be able to detect the mechanisms of panspermia such as asteroid, spacecraft, or what have you.

My husband is used to hearing snark about being a lobbyist. As the owner of a lobbying firm in Chicago, he takes most derogatory comments about his profession in stride. So imagine my surprise when he became outraged reading aloud a boilerplate description of Washington lobbyists in our daughter’s new high school textbook:

In reality, many lobbyists in Washington are ‘fixers’ who offer to influence government policies for a price. Their personal connections help to open doors to allow their paying clients to ‘just get a chance to talk’ with top officials.

There was more to get his Irish up: