A long lasting foreshock series controlled the rupture process of this year's great earthquake near Iquique in northern Chile, according to an international research team

The earthquake was heralded by a three quarter year long foreshock series of ever increasing magnitudes culminating in a Mw 6.7 event two weeks before the mainshock.

The mainshock (magnitude 8.2) finally broke, on April 1st, a central piece out of the most important seismic gap along the South American subduction zone. The study reveals that the Iquique earthquake occurred in a region where the two colliding tectonic plates where only partly locked.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is so commonly diagnosed – and overdiagnosed, and misdiagnosed – that it is hard to know what is based on evidence and what is based on teachers and concerned parents reacting to children that don't like to sit around and do nothing.

Actual clinical ADHD used to be rare but now it is a common problem of "pill culture" in psychiatry and the most common behavioral disorder label given to children in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This idea goes back in 1967. James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, found a way to use a planetary atmosphere to detect life. He suggested that we look for simultaneous presence of pairs of gases like oxygen and methane that react together. We can also search for gases such as oxygen above  levels expected from abiotic processes.

As  far as we can see, Mars atmosphere seems to be close to equilibrium in this way. So when Viking I and II landed there in 1976, and found a barren desert-like surface, it seemed natural to conclude that there is no life on Mars.

In the 1950s and '60s, economics in America really had a heyday. Tinkering is easy when the economy is good. By the 1970s, it was realized that economics truly was, as historian Thomas Carlyle labeled it in the 19th century, a "dismal science" - except leave off the science.

Natural gas proliferation has been a huge boon for the environment - CO2 emissions have plummeted among the U.S. energy sector, primarily because coal emissions have been knocked back to early 1980s levels. But there are concerns by environmentalists that modern hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") has risks, and it has been implicated in everything from earthquakes to methane in water even to claims it will cause the earth to deflate.

Bacteria in the gut help the body to digest food, and stimulate the immune system. A PhD project at the National Food Institute, Technical University of Denmark, examines whether modulations of the gut bacterial composition affect intestinal integrity, i.e. the ability of the body to maintain a well-regulated barrier function that hinders bacteria from entering the body unintentionally.

The human gut contains more than 100 trillion bacteria, which help the body digest food, produce vitamins protect against disease-provoking bacteria in food, and stimulate the immune system. All these bacteria are separated from the rest of the body by the intestinal wall, which functions as a selective barrier aimed at allowing only useful substances to pass and be absorbed in the body.

The Mediterranean fruit fly is a serious agricultural pest, it
infests more than 300 types of cultivated and wild fruits, vegetables and nuts and causes extreme damage to crops all around the world. 

The fly is currently controlled by a combination of insecticides, baited traps, biological control and releasing sterilized insects to produce non-viable matings, known as the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT). 

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has captured an extreme and rare event in the regions immediately surrounding the supermassive black hole Markarian 335: a compact source of X-rays that sits near the black hole - the corona - has moved closer to the black hole over a period of just days. 

Depending on the analysis strategy used, estimating treatment outcomes in meta-­analyses may differ and may result in major alterations in the conclusions derived from the analysis, according to a study in JAMA which could easily apply to all fields.