As early as 2015 China’s use of thermal coal for electricity could peak. Bret Arnett/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

By James Whitmore, The Conversation

A look at 634 couples found that the more often they smoked marijuana, the less likely they were to engage in domestic violence.  

The scholars attempted to clarify inconsistent findings about domestic violence among pot-smoking couples that primarily has been based on cross-sectional data (i.e., data from one point in time). Looking at couples over the first nine years of marriage, the study found:

• More frequent marijuana use by husbands and wives (two-to-three times per month or more often) predicted less frequent intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration by husbands.

• Husbands' marijuana use also predicted less frequent IPV perpetration by wives.

Biofilms are the first line of defense for harmful bacteria and make the treatment of skin infections especially difficult because microorganisms protected in a biofilm have antibiotic resistance and recalcitrance to treatment.

Biofilm-protected bacteria account for some 80 percent of total bacterial infections in humans and are 50 to 1,000 times more resistant to antibiotics than simpler bacterial infections.

 Biofilms often persist in the periphery of an actual wound, beneath an intact, healthy skin layer and the difficulty of their treatment is largely due to the outermost layer of the skin, the stratum corneum, being a natural barrier for drug delivery.

Researchers have devised a new way to separate cells by exposing them to sound waves as they flow through a tiny channel.

Separating cells with sound offers a gentler alternative to existing cell-sorting technologies, which require tagging the cells with chemicals or exposing them to stronger mechanical forces that may damage them.
Their device, about the size of a dime, could be used to detect the extremely rare tumor cells that circulate in cancer patients' blood, helping doctors predict whether a tumor is going to spread.

Dsillusioned churchgoers may find it increasingly difficult to remain associated with their church, yet many also find it difficult to leave.  They have not only a moral identity crisis but deep identity crises as their most important relationships and beliefs are put at risk. 

The authors of a paper in the Journal of Consumer Research conducted interviews with people who identify as former churchgoers and asked them to reflect on their experiences in leaving the church and the challenges of constructing a new identity as they rejected church authority and its doctrines.

Do you feel sadder watching a documentary about war or a drama about a young person dying of cancer?

If you poll most people, they will say there are stronger emotional reactions when stories are based on true events rather than fiction, but a new analysis in the Journal of Consumer Research finds that is not so.

In the world of mixed environmental and social problems, such as global warming policy, there is a tug of war between social authoritarian forces that want top-down laws and regulations and behavior control, and a grass roots strategy that believes awareness and people making better consumption choices will be superior.

A paper in the Journal of Consumer Research is evidence for the social authoritarians. It finds that responsible consumption shifts the burden for solving global problems from governments to consumers and ultimately benefits corporations more than society.

Some epidemiological papers have linked an increased risk of autism in children with women who took antidepressants during pregnancy. Suggestions have been that antidepressants or severe maternal depression cause autism.

In a Molecular Psychiatry paper, investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital report that while a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder was more common in the children of mothers prescribed antidepressants during pregnancy than in those with no prenatal exposure, when the severity of the mother's depression was accounted for, that increased risk was no longer statistically significant.

Wave-particle duality suggests that elementary particles, like electrons and photons, cannot be completely described as either waves or particles, because they exhibit both types of properties. In the double-slit experiment, observing a photon pass through one of the two slits is an example of a particle-like property; a particle can only pass through one or the other. When two waves converge to form an interference pattern, the photon must have passed through both slits simultaneously—a wave-like property.

Trying to measure both types of properties simultaneously is problematic because the interference pattern disappears as soon as it is known through which slit the photon has passed.