As many times as your mother said your behavior would be 'the death of' her, the reverse seems to be true, according to a large study of childless couples. The prevalence of mental illness was also halved in couples who became adoptive parents, the study shows.

It's not the first time that childlessness has been linked with higher than expected death rates, say the authors, but the link has traditionally been attributed to unhealthy behaviors and poor mental and physical health, and few studies have differentiated between voluntary and involuntary childlessness, they say. This work focused on couples treated for infertility.

The announcement that Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge (and, despite our title, not a princess, like Diana was, for arcane reasons that only experts in Teutonic monarchy understand) is expecting her first child is also bringing attention to a little-known pregnancy condition known as hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), a severe form of nausea and vomiting in pregnancy that can be debilitating because it causes serious dehydration and malnutrition. 

Gaming researcher Jonas Linderoth of the University of Gothenburg followed a group of players in the world's largest online role-play game World of Warcraft for a period of ten months. He observed the players almost daily in their fictional online lives and also filmed and interviewed them.

Scientists have reaffirmed that pollinator services of large agriculture fields can be enhanced with a simple cost-effective measure - the creation of small patches of native plants within fruit orchards.

Economics messes everything up.  Just about the time we figure out a new way to make all boats rise, the boats don't play along.

So it goes with the Mediterranean diet, which went from food fad to inclusion in the UNESCO Olympus of the World heritage list and saw lots and lots of research grant money dumped into extolling its virtues, as kind of a cure-all for obesity.  And people listened.

Chemists have been using
the SPring-8 synchrotron at the Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute
to get a detailed look at enzymes that could help power the green economy. 

One option for powering clean, environment friendly vehicles is to run them on hydrogen fuel rather than carbon-based fuels. Cheap catalysts to prepare hydrogen gas (H2) are a necessity if this future "hydrogen economy" is to become a reality.

Current man-made catalysts are based on platinum, a rare and precious metal. However, living cells contain enzymes called hydrogenases, based on the abundant metals nickel and iron, which can do the same job. Chemists are very interested in figuring out how these natural catalysts work and trying to mimic them.

Physicists have found elusive Dirac electrons in a superconducting material called copper-doped bismuth selenide - and say it could serve as the silicon of the quantum era. 

Quantum computers use atoms to perform processing and memory tasks and for a generation have been promising dramatic increases in computing power because of their ability to carry out scores of calculations at once.  

Superconductors can, at cold enough temperatures, conduct electricity indefinitely from one kickstart of energy because they have no electrical resistance. Dirac electrons, named after the English physicist whose equation describes their behavior, are particles with such high energy that they straddle the realms of classical and quantum physics.