At this time of year it is common to see food drives for the less fortunate - and then we see reports saying that low-income people are disproportionately obese and can't control themselves and need to be taxed more heavily in order to eat less.

How can it be both? Welcome to modern American food policy.

Academics writing in Marketing Science want poor people to spend more on food and analyzed six years of sales data from over 1,700 supermarkets across the U.S. to make the case that poor people will behave as elites want if the price of food is changed. 

Using new images that show unprecedented detail, scientists have found that material rotating around a very young protostar probably has dragged in and twisted magnetic fields from the larger area surrounding the star. The discovery, made with the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, has important implications for how dusty disks -- the raw material for planet formation -- grow around young stars.

Scientists from James Cook University have discovered two critically endangered species of sea snakes they thought were extinct. They were basically hiding in plain sight on Ashmore Reef in the Timor Sea, they just hadn't been since in over 15 years.

A Western Australia Parks and Wildlife Officer, Grant Griffin, sent a photo of the snakes in for identification.

 "We were blown away, these potentially extinct snakes were there in plain sight, living on one of Australia's natural icons, Ningaloo Reef," says lead author Blanche D'Anastasi from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at JCU. "What is even more exciting is that they were courting, suggesting that they are members of a breeding population." 

It has been long-established that mental health and behavioral problems such as alcohol and drug abuse are risk factors that push teens to smoke. A new study finds that less destructive kids will opt for e-cigarettes instead of cancer-causing cigarettes.

That's a win for the future of public health, where smoking is linked to numerous maladies.

 In recent years, smoking has declined in middle and high school students, but the use of electronic cigarettes in this group tripled from 2013 to 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The hope is that they are using them to wean off cigarettes and will not cause a nicotine addiction that pushes young people into smoking. 

A team of academic cancer specialists has a way to lower drug discovery costs without politicians killing off one of the few remaining non-service industries in America: do less research.

Currently, early cancer drug studies involve extra biopsies solely for the purpose of trying to understand the pharmacodynamics -- what the drug does to the tumor -- they are often mandatory in government-sponsored phase 1 clinical trials because the belief is that computer and cellular models won't be accurate enough. This obviously increases the time and costs of development and a team says that this costly process has had no impact on subsequent drug development or how physicians use these new drugs to treat future patients.

About 25 years ago, Michael Hall discovered the protein "Target of Rapamycin" (TOR) in yeast. It is one of the most studied members of the protein kinase family, an important family of regulatory proteins that control many cellular processes. Later, a TOR kinase was also found in mammalian cells, where it is known as mTOR - the mammalian Target of Rapamycin.

Chronic inflammation in the bloodstream can 'fan the flames' of depression, much like throwing gasoline on a fire, according to a new paper from researchers at Rice University and Ohio State University.

'Inflammation: Depression Fans the Flames and Feasts on the Heat' appeared in a recent edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry. The study reviewed 200 existing papers on depression and inflammation.

When it comes to trust in their physicians, minority groups in the United States are less likely than white people to believe their doctors care about them, according to research by University of Pennsylvania's Abigail Sewell.

"That's one of the biggest takeaways of this work," said Sewell, a Vice Provost Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Penn's Population Studies Center in the School of Arts&Sciences. "African-Americans and Latinos are more likely to think this," though the latter group, she showed, has even deeper mistrust of physicians, likely because one or both Latino parents originally came from somewhere else.