The legacy of European science and biotechnology is good - Europeans say that health research is important - but modern acceptance of science remains lacking. However, a new survey by Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale - Inserm - shows that Europeans may discard their recent stance against science and embrace progress again. It will take a culture of science literacy on par with the United States and a culture that shakes off government control, according to the results.

Humans are unique in their ability to acquire language. But how? A new study published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences shows that we are in fact born with the basic fundamental knowledge of language, thus shedding light on the age-old linguistic "nature vs. nurture" debate.

While languages differ from each other in many ways, certain aspects appear to be shared across languages. These aspects might stem from linguistic principles that are active in all human brains. A natural question then arises: are infants born with knowledge of how the human words might sound like? Are infants biased to consider certain sound sequences as more word-like than others?

BLA, ShBA, LBA

Most stars with masses similar to that of our Sun will end their lives as white dwarfs; small, very dense, and hot bodies that slowly cool down over billions of years. On the way to this final phase of their lives the stars throw their atmospheres out into the space and create planetary nebulae, colorful glowing clouds of gas surrounding the small, bright stellar relics.

An captured by ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows the remarkably round planetary nebula Abell 33, located about 1,500 light-years from Earth. A round appearance is uncommon. Usually something - for example, the way the star spins, or if the central star is one component of a double or multiple star system - disturbs the symmetry and causes the planetary nebula to display irregular shapes.

Global health funding hit an all-time high of $31.3 billion in 2013, five times greater than in 1990, but its 3.9% growth from 2012 to 2013 shows it is at least slowing down a little, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Health Affairs.

As funding from many bilateral donors and development banks has declined, growth in funding from the GAVI Alliance, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, non-governmental organizations, and the UK government is counteracting these cuts.

Global health funding remains small relative to what high-income countries spend on their own health, representing only 1% of these countries' health expenditure.

The mandate for health insurance isn't just raising the costs for the health care of almost all Americans,  it will also alter costs for several major types of liability insurance, according to a new RAND Corporation report.

Automobile, workers' compensation and general business liability insurance costs may fall under the Affordable Care Act, while costs for medical malpractice coverage could be higher, according to the study.

Researchers say the changes could be as much as 5 percent of costs in some states, but caution there is considerable uncertainty surrounding such estimates. The findings are from one of the first systematic studies of how the Affordable Care Act could influence costs for liability and related lines of insurance.

Northern sea otters living off the coast of Washington state were infected with the same H1N1 flu virus that caused the world-wide pandemic in 2009, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.

During an August 2011 health monitoring project, USGS and CDC scientists found evidence that the Washington sea otters were infected with the pandemic 2009 H1N1 virus, although the exact date and source of exposure could not be determined. The findings suggest that human flu can infect sea otters.

"Our study shows that sea otters may be a newly identified animal host of influenza viruses," said Hon Ip, a USGS scientist and co-author of the study.

Researchers writing in Cell Communication and Signaling say that abnormal levels of lipid molecules in the brain can affect the interaction between two key neural pathways in early prenatal brain development, which can trigger autism.

Environmental causes such as exposure to chemicals in some cosmetics and common over-the-counter medication can affect the levels of these lipids, according to the researchers.