States that have decriminalized marijuana have also seen dramatic increases in children requiring medical intervention, according to research in the Annals of Emergency Medicine ("Association of Unintentional Pediatric Exposures with Decriminalization of Marijuana in the U.S.") which analyzed call volume to U.S. poison centers from January 2005 through December 2011. 

Men, if you want a short term thing and not a lot of talks about "us" and "the relationship", your odds improve if your parents gave you the gift of a wider face.

Women see wider faces as more dominant, and therefore more attractive, at least for short-term relationships. At around age 30, women start to prefer men with jobs and stable personalities.

And since this was a study of speed dating participants, it's probably true, for speed dating participants.

A new study found that the ability to follow another's gaze or look in the direction someone is pointing, two examples of receptive joint attention, is significantly heritable.

Determining such communicative cues are significantly heritable means variation in this ability has a genetic basis, the authors say, which has led them to the vasopressin receptor gene, known for its role in social bonding.

They are looking for insight into the biology of disorders in which receptive joint attention is compromised, such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD), which could lead to new diagnosis and treatment strategies.

'Whole Grain', like 'Natural' and 'Organic', has a lot of definitions. Fortunately for marketing departments, people often read their own positive definitions into those terms.

But people invariably pay more for all of those things, so if they pay for organic, they deserve to know if it has any of dozens of synthetic ingredients (it probably does) or the levels of pesticides on it. And the same for other food terms. Toward that end, writers in Food and Nutrition Research have set out to create the most comprehensive definition of "whole grain" to-date, in order to assist in the production and labeling of foods 'rich in whole grains' as part of the HEALTHGRAIN EU project, which focuses on cereals and health.

Sometimes it's just public relations. We subsidize nicotine patches but regulators are increasingly interested in banning electronic cigarettes.

Such misguided legislation, not backed by sound data, may have consequences for public health, experts say. With smoking blamed for up to six million premature deaths each year, a lot is at stake in the newest push for regulations.

A new paper correlates brain activity with how people make decisions.

Based on these images, the authors suggest that when individuals engage in risky behavior, such as drunk driving or unsafe sex, it's not because their brains' desire systems are too active, but because their self-control systems are not active enough. 

Defense lawyers now have a new way to make criminal behavior exculpatory. Unless the judge knows something about the weaknesses of inferring cause and effect based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and read this article about how mainstream media love weak observational studies because they make for catchy headlines.

The nature of social science is that you will frequently find papers arguing contradictory positions, and nothing shows that like video games. On Science 2.0 alone, you can find dozens of studies arguing both sides.

Mirjana Bajovic of Brock University quizzed a group of eighth-graders (aged 13–14) about their playing habits and patterns and determined their stage of moral reasoning using an established scale of one to four. The goal was to determine if there was a link between the types of video games teens played, how long they played them, and the teens’ levels of moral reasoning: their ability to take the perspective of others into account. 

The increasing use of chemical herbicides, both synthetic and organic kinds, is often blamed for the declining plant biodiversity in farms, but it is simplistic to think herbicide exposure is solely to blame.

The science doesn't add up. If herbicides are a key factor in declining diversity, then thriving species would be more tolerant to widely used herbicides than rare or declining species, according to J. Franklin Egan, research ecologist, USDA-Agricultural Research Service. But that isn't the case.

For decades, scientists have been pushing toward the goal of creating artificial building blocks that can self-assemble in large numbers and reassemble to take on new tasks or to remedy defects. Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark have taken a step toward that.

"The potential of such new man-made systems is almost limitless, and many expect these novel materials to become the foundation of future technologies," says Dr. Maik Hadorn from Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Zürich. "We used short DNA strands as smart glue to link preliminary stages of artificial cells (called artificial vesicles) to engineer novel tissue-like structures."