E-cigarettes, battery-powered devices that heat a liquid nicotine solution, have been sold in the United States since 2007 and are marketed as an option to help smokers kick the habit.  Instead of a nicotine patch or chewing gum, e-cigarette users inhale the vapor.

It's obviously safer than smoking but anti-cigarette advocates in the United States of America are also against this 'vaping' because of the presence of cigarette companies as investors. Originally, smoking awareness was to get people to get rid of smoking but a campaign against a smoking cessation product means it is more of a desire to get rid of certain companies.

A systematic review of the genomes of patients with ALK-negative anaplastic large cell lymphoma (ALCL), a particularly aggressive form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, shows that many cases of the disease are driven by alterations in the JAK/STAT3 cell signaling pathway. The study also demonstrates, in mice implanted with human-derived ALCL tumors, that the disease can be inhibited by compounds that target this pathway, raising hopes that more effective treatments might soon be developed. 

A team of astronomers studied the simultaneous collision of four galaxies in the galaxy cluster Abell 3827 and could trace out where the mass lies within the system and compare the distribution of the dark matter with the positions of the luminous galaxies.

Although dark matter cannot be seen, the team could deduce its location using a technique called gravitational lensing. The collision happened to take place directly in front of a much more distant, unrelated source. The mass of dark matter around the colliding galaxies severely distorted spacetime, deviating the path of light rays coming from the distant background galaxy -- and distorting its image into characteristic arc shapes.

Climate change and the loss of biodiversity are two of the greatest environmental issues of our time. Is it possible to address both of those problems at once?

In Australia, farmers and landholders will this week be able to apply for payments through the Federal government’s A$2.55 billion Emissions Reduction Fund. Bidders can request funding for projects that reduce emissions using agreed methods, which include approaches relevant to the transport, waste and mining sectors, as well as the land sector: for example, by managing or restoring forests.

Shaved heads have come in and out of fashion over the past few decades, but some people don’t have the option of allowing their locks to grow.

Thankfully, for those who do suffer from hair loss, or alopecia, help may be at hand. Somewhat counter-intuitively an effective treatment for baldness may come from plucking a certain number of hairs – in a specific formation – from the scalp.

A remote gas planet has been detected about 13,000 light-years away, making it one of the most distant planets known.

The Poland-based Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) Warsaw Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile scans the skies for planets using a method called microlensing. A microlensing event occurs when one star happens to pass in front of another, and its gravity acts as a lens to magnify and brighten the more distant star's light. If that foreground star happens to be orbited by a planet, the planet might cause a blip in the magnification. For a new study in Astrophysical Journal the researchers combined that with data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Like virtual water and virtual emissions, looking at organic food through a prism of implicit benefits translated into estimated dollars makes it look a lot more economically viable than it otherwise might appear.

The new estimate says that organic farming systems do a better job of capitalizing on nature's services than they are credited with, and natural processes that aid farming and that can substitute for costly fossil fuel-based inputs are cost-effective.

A new study has found that after just five days of eating a high-fat diet, the way in which the body's muscle processes nutrients changes.

When food is eaten, the level of glucose in the blood rises. The body's muscle is a major clearinghouse for this glucose. It may break it down for energy, or it can store it for later use. Since muscle makes up about 30 percent of our body weight and it is such an important site for glucose metabolism, if normal metabolism is altered, it can have consequences on the rest of the body and can lead to health issues.

Having once lived in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, on occasion I would drive to those old gigantic relics of steel mills.

They were behemoths and so were the buildings that housed them. They looked like they could block out the sun. In John Ford's "The Quiet Man", a native of Ireland asked John Wayne's character what they feed men in Pittsburgh that makes them so big and Wayne replied, "Steel, and pig-iron furnaces so hot a man forgets his fear of hell". In the early 1950s it was a job for hard men.

The tragic death recently of a young Queensland boxer raised the question of safety in the sport and whether boxing should be banned.

Claims that boxing is safer than a number of very popular and well-accepted sports warrant careful scrutiny as they often derive from overly simplistic analyses.

The risks associated with boxing should never be trivialized, but science and technology could possibly help to mitigate them.