Tomato lovers rejoice: Adding or rearranging a few simple steps in commercial processing could dramatically improve the flavor of this popular fruit sold in the grocery store, according to researchers.

"Ideally, tomatoes should be picked ripe and then sold immediately, as they are at farm stands," says Jinhe Bai, Ph.D. But this isn't always possible for commercially sold tomatoes, which are often stored and then shipped over long distances.

To prevent tomatoes from becoming too ripe before they reach the store, growers pick them when they are still green. Packers then use a gas called ethylene to trigger fruit ripening, and after that the tomatoes are stored and shipped at low temperatures.

Shorter mothers have shorter pregnancies, smaller babies, and higher risk for a preterm birth. New research has found that a mother's height directly influences her risk for preterm birth.

Investigators at the March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center Ohio Collaborative looked at 3,485 Nordic women and their babies, and found that maternal height, which is determined by genetic factors, helped shape the fetal environment, influencing the length of pregnancy and frequency of prematurity. In contrast, birth length and birth weight are mainly influenced by transmitted genes. Preterm birth is the number one killer of newborns in the United States and serious gaps exist between racial and ethnic groups.

The explosion in coffee consumption in the past two decades has generally not benefited farmers of coffee beans in poorer nations along the equator, it has mostly just helped corporations, including those marketing "fair trade" as some sort of ethical improvement..

Does watching the news make you lose faith in a higher purpose? Does taking out an army of terrorists alone without so much as a scratch make you feel like you must have a divine gift? An analysis of cellphone data shows that spiritual awareness does vary based on activity, rather than being constant, according to sociologists at the American Sociological Association meeting who say that people had the highest levels of spiritual awareness in the morning and while engaged in activities such as praying, worship, and meditation. Spiritual awareness also was high when people listened to music, read, or exercised. It was low while people were doing work-related activities or playing video games. 

In a dramatic 2013 cover story, Time warned of “A World Without Bees,” subtitled “The price we’ll pay if we don’t figure out what’s killing the honeybee.” Its author argued that the class of agricultural pesticides know as neonicotinoids was killing the honeybee and that the planet would starve unless we banned these chemicals immediately. He said this because “1 in every 3 mouthfuls you’ll eat today,” depends on bee pollination. In short: no bees, no food.

As more money has been spent on biomedical research in the United States over the past 50 years, there has been diminished return on investment in terms of life expectancy gains and new drug approvals, two Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers say.

In a report published Aug. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found that while the number of scientists has increased more than nine-fold since 1965 and the National Institutes of Health's budget has increased four-fold, the number of new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration has only increased a little more than two-fold. Meanwhile, life expectancy gains have remained constant at roughly two months per year.