We have already had a view from the Mediterranean of Jupiter, Venus and the Moon in Seeing Jupiter In Daylight.  Jupiter and Venus are getting closer together in the sky, and on the 1st of July, at around 8:00 UTC, actual conjunction will occur, when the two planets are at the same Ecliptic longitude (referring the annual path taken by the Sun against our stellar background.)  At that time, the planets will be below the Horizon for New World observers.

Cancer and type 2 diabetes are two of the most significant public health burdens facing the world today, and currently available data suggests their prevalence is expected to continue to increase. Nut consumption has long been hypothesized to have a role in preventing both of these diseases, but until now evidence has been inconsistent. A new systematic review and meta-analysis published in Nutrition Reviews on June 16 shows that nut consumption is, indeed, associated with a decreased risk of certain types of cancer, but not type 2 diabetes.

A new approach to skin rejuvenation developed at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) may be less likely to have unintended side effects such as scarring and altered pigmentation. In the online journal Scientific Reports, an MGH research team reports that treatment with pulsed electric fields - a noninvasive procedure that does not involve the generation of heat - removed skin cells in an animal model without affecting the supporting extracellular matrix, eventually leading to renewal of the skin surface.

Inside the cell, DNA is tightly coiled and packed with several proteins into a structure called "chromatin", which allows DNA to fit in the cell while also preventing genes from being expressed at the wrong time. Guided by a chemical "barcode", specialized effector proteins can bind chromatin and either unwind it or compact further to activate or silence genes. This system has enormous implications for biology and medicine, e.g. cancer research. However, the efficiency of effector-chromatin interactions have been elusive, especially given the weak binding between the two. Tracking these interactions one molecule at a time, EPFL scientists have shown for the first time how a major effector protein speeds up its search for chromatin binding sites pairing up with others of its kind.

A new study led by Vanderbilt University Medical Center investigators found new diagnoses of prostate cancer in the U.S. declined 28 percent in the year following the draft recommendation from the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) against routine PSA screening for men. The new research, led by first author Daniel Barocas, M.D., MPH, assistant professor of urological surgery and medicine, was posted online in the June 15 issue of The Journal of Urology in advance of publication.

The society you live in can shape the complexity of your brain--and it does so differently for social insects than for humans and other vertebrate animals.

A new comparative study of social and solitary wasp species suggests that as social behavior evolved, the brain regions for central cognitive processing in social insect species shrank. This is the opposite of the pattern of brain increases with sociality that has been documented for several kinds of vertebrate animals including mammals, birds and fish.

A new study in Sweden links male infertility to autoimmune prostatic inflammation.  

Infertility - involuntary childlessness - is common, and in half of all cases attributable to infertility in the man. Although male infertility has many possible causes, it often remains unexplained. 

In the present study, researchers from Karolinska Institutet discovered a reason for reduced fertility in people with autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 1 (APS1), which increases the risk of developing autoimmune disease (caused by the immune system attacking and damaging healthy cells) and which is often used as a model for autoimmune disease in general. 

An immense cloud of hydrogen has been observed dispersing from the warm, Neptune-sized planet Gliese 436b orbiting nearby star Gliese 436. 

The enormous gaseous tail of the planet is about 50 times the size of the parent star.  A phenomenon this large has never before been seen around such a small exoplanet. 

There are more men in hard science and engineering and there are a variety of explanations for why, everything from the sexism notion, promoted by those in the social sciences, to the idea that the physical sciences and engineering don't seem directly related to helping people, which is an explanation offered by women who choose a life science or medicine. One odd notion, typified by prominent friend of Obama Dr. Larry Summers while he was at Harvard, was that women were not as good at math.