Warning labels on medications about the dangers of driving don't stop people from getting behind the wheel, according to Dr Tanya Smyth, from the Queensland University of Technology   Centre for Accident Research&Road Safety.

Driving while affected by prescription and over-the-counter medications had the potential to be as dangerous as driving under the influence of illegal drugs. Medication warning labels and accompanying pharmacist advice were the primary method to control drug driving but required the user to self-assess their impairment.

If you're a man, how much you eat may have more to do with the gender of your dining companions than your appetite, according to a paper published in Evolutionary Psychological Science which claims that men will eat significantly more food in the company of women than they will with other men. 

As the 20th-century novelist Joseph Conrad famously wrote, "It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose," and Nature is very busy, so she makes lots of them. But as a genius, she can use them to advantage. Take for example whole genome duplication -- an error in DNA replication, or mating between different species, that doubles the number of chromosomes, leading to a duplication of the vast majority of genes. Such grand mistakes turn out to be among the major forces accelerating evolution.

Like with emissions control and human rights, the Chinese government will publicly say one thing and then do another. Reducing cigarette smoking is in that same camp.  

China is the world's largest producer and consumer of cigarettes, with more than 300 million smokers. The annual cigarette related death toll of 1.4 million (which includes approximately 100,000 deaths blamed on second-hand smoke) is expected to triple by 2050. 

People diagnosed with schizophrenia who are prone to hallucinations are likely to have structural differences in a key region of the brain compared to both healthy individuals and people diagnosed with schizophrenia who do not hallucinate, according to research published today.

The study, led by the University of Cambridge in collaboration with Durham University, Macquarie University, and Trinity College Dublin, found that reductions in the length of the paracingulate sulcus (PCS), a fold towards the front of the brain, were associated with increased risk of hallucinations in people diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Cetuximab, marketed as Erbitux, is one of the key therapies for metastatic colorectal cancer, yet the cancer still returns in some patients, shortening overall survival. A new study may help explain why. Key proteins, known as epidermal growth factor receptors (EGFR), are regulated, leading to resistance.

"Our study investigated the role of extracellular methylation in EGFR signaling, and unexpectedly discovered new information about how EGFR renders cancer cells resistant to cetuximab antibody therapy," said Mien Chie Hung, Ph.D., chair of Molecular and Cellular Oncology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Scientists have shown how a parasitic worm infection common in the developing world increases susceptibility to tuberculosis. The study demonstrated that treating the parasite reduces lung damage seen in mice that also are infected with tuberculosis, thereby eliminating the vulnerability to tuberculosis (TB) that the parasite is known to cause.

The study raises the possibility of using inexpensive and widely available anti-parasitic drugs as a preventive measure in places where the parasite and TB are common -- stopping infection with the parasite and reducing susceptibility to TB and the risk of a latent TB infection progressing to disease.

Noisy gymnasiums, restaurants where conversations are nearly impossible, and concert halls less than perfect for the music are all engineering problems.

What does that have to do with emotions? Perhaps a lot. Penn State acoustical engineers are using functional MRI, measuring brain activity by sensing changes in blood flow in the brain, to better understand room acoustics and the emotions they can cause.

As I am revising the book I am writing on the history of the CDF experiment, I have bits and pieces of text that I decided to remove, but which retain some interest for some reason. Below I offer a clip which discusses the measurement of the natural width of the Z boson produced by CDF with Run 0 data in 1989. The natural width of a particle is a measurement of how undetermined is its rest mass, due to the very fast decay. The Z boson is in fact the shortest lived particle we know, and its width is of 2.5 GeV.