Americans' perceptions of income inequality are largely over-inflated due to political and cultural grandstanding, at least when compared with actual census data.

Most science fiction and news stories describe Mars terraforming as a long term but simple process. You warm up the planet first, with greenhouse gases, giant mirrors, impacting comets or some such. You land humans on the surface right away and they introduce lifeforms designed to live on Mars. Over a period of a thousand years or so, life spreads over the planet and transforms it, and Mars becomes a second Earth.

Like most government spending programs, once environmental lobbyists got their way and renewable ethanol biofuels became mandated and subsidized, they have been difficult to eliminate.

Perhaps the news that blending more ethanol into fuel to supposedly cut air pollution from vehicles carries a hidden risk of toxic or even explosive gases in buildings may help. 

Those problems would likely occur in buildings with cracked foundations that happen to be in the vicinity of fuel spills. Vapors that rise from contaminated groundwater can be sucked inside, according to Rice University environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez. Once there, trapped pools of methane could ignite and toxic hydrocarbons could cause health woes, he said.

Short term over-eating is no problem - just don't make a habit of it and you will be fine, according to a paper in The Journal of Physiology and thousands of years of common sense.

Some studies have said that even a few days of excess calorie intake, where you consume more calories than you burn, brings detrimental health impacts, but the new paper found that a daily bout of exercise generates vast physiological benefits even when you consume thousands of calories more than you are burning. Exercise clearly does a lot more than simply reduce the energy surplus. 

Patients receiving the widely used anesthesia drug etomidate for surgery may be at increased risk or mortality and cardiovascular events, according to a study in Anesthesia&Analgesia which adds to safety concerns over etomidate's use as an anesthetic and sedative drug.

The study assessed the risk of adverse outcomes in patients receiving etomidate for induction of anesthesia. Rates of death and cardiovascular events in about 2,100 patients receiving etomidate were compared to those in a matched group of 5,200 patients receiving induction with a different intravenous anesthetic, propofol. All patients had severe but non-critical medical conditions— ASA physical status III or IV—and were undergoing noncardiac surgery.

Prisons have started to cut back on fruits and some vegetables for felons because they have discovered how to make booze with them. 

It isn't as great as it sounds. Emergency unit physicians have report severe botulism poisoning from a batch of potato-based "wine" (also known as pruno) cooked up in a Utah prison. The only thing crazier than inject botulism into your face is putting it in your stomach.

It could be in a billion years, it could start tomorrow, but physicists have long predicted that the universe may one day collapse, and that everything in it will be compressed to a small hard ball.

Like a lot of things, it just takes a little mathematics to conclude that the risk of a collapse is even greater than previously thought.

Ignoring meaningless platitudes like 'age is all in your mind', age is more than a number of years. 'You are as young as you feel' may be more apt because factors such as health, cognitive function and disability rates are important ways to measure age in all its dimensions.

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
population researchers Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov seek to reorient the way demographers study population aging, providing a new toolbox of methodologies for demographers to better understand the impacts of an aging population on society, by measuring based instead on characteristics of people that change with age, including life expectancy, health, cognitive function, and other measures. 

This month, 23andMe, the most prominent genetic home testing company, stopped offering anything more than ancestry results due to a warning by the FDA that its marketing claims about the value of their health-related reports were not backed by evidence regarding their accuracy.

The FDA was concerned that inaccurate results, including false positives or negatives, could lead some customers to seek treatment for diseases they don't actually have, or to begin to medicate improperly, which has potentially fatal results,