In another reversal of claims that saturated fats were killing people and their replacement, trans fats, were healthier, another study has found that saturated fats are not associated with an increased risk of death, heart disease, stroke, or type 2 diabetes. Instead, trans fats are associated with greater risk of death and coronary heart disease. This is a dramatic change and vindicates organizations like the American Council on Science and Health, which had stated decades ago that saturated fats in moderation were not harmful and that groups that scare the public to raise money were simply exaggerating flawed animal studies to worry people.

Rapid eye movements (REMs) during sleep may contribute to the visual part of our dreams by acting as a switch from image to image, researchers have found. The study, which measured the activity of individual cells in the brain in both awake and sleeping participants, is important because it is the first of its kind and provides a great starting point for uncovering the deeper secrets of human consciousness.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has effectively ended any chance of same-sex marriage in this term of parliament. Public opinion in Australia is in clear support of same-sex marriage. So how have opponents had so much success in blocking change?

Prominent arguments against same-sex marriage have been based on history, tradition, human rights, and social scientific research into health and welfare. The role of religion in opposition has been less explicit.

Religion, history and tradition

The consistency of the whole appearance rather than the attractiveness of the parts is not just  saying, it's science, according to a study where participants were shown schematic point-light displays that depict a person using 15 moving dots.

The representation conveyed both the individual characteristics of a person's movements and their individual body shape. 

The team isolated these two areas and separately measured the attractiveness of individual movement styles as well as individual body shapes based on ratings obtained from his research participants. The researchers then combined the movement style of one person with the body shapes of another person and collected attractiveness ratings from these "hybrid walkers".

One of the nice things about the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson is that the particle has been found at a very special spot - that is, with a very special mass. At 125 GeV, the Higgs boson has a significant probability to decay into a multitude of different final states, making the hunt for Higgs events entertaining and diverse.

Today, many wealthy countries are able to mitigate, to some degree, their risk of delta flooding through vulnerability-reducing investments, but a new model suggests that this mitigation may not be sustainable in the long-term.

Ultimately, wealthy countries could be feeling the strain of floods to a similar degree as developing countries.

Quantitative analysis of the performance of men and women professional tennis players over the past five completed seasons shows for the first time that evidence of inconsistency in women's play is likely attributable to match format (e.g., best of three or five sets), not gender, Stephanie Kovalchik--an associate statistician with the RAND Corporation--today revealed at a session focused on analytics of women's sports at the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM 2015) in Seattle.

During her topic-contributed session, titled "Are Women Professional Tennis Players Really Less Consistent Than Male Players?", Kovalchik said she carried out the research project to test the hypothesis that female tennis players are less consistent than their male counterparts.

From Austrian monks to American craft brewers, beer geeks are everywhere. But making a good beer not only depends on the best ingredients, but also the best yeast.

The beer world is divided into ales and lagers. The original and highly versatile yeast, Saccharromyces cerevisiae, has been used for millennium to make ales, wine and bread. But the second great beer innovation was the origins of lager beer during the 15th century, when Bavarians first noticed that beer stored in the caves during the winter continued to ferment (from the German lagern: to store). The result was a lighter and smoother beer that, after sharing it with their neighboring Bohemians, went on to dominate 19th and 20th century beers tastes, especially in America.

The latest dubious tactic of global soft-drink giant Coca-Cola has now been revealed for what it is - a move by an industry with a threatened financial future to confuse science, policy and the public, in order to buy time, and protect profits.