Kepler-413b is located 2,300 light-years (about 700 parsecs) away in the constellation Cygnus. It circles a close pair of orange and red dwarf stars every 66 days but what really makes Kepler-413b unusual is that it precesses wildly on its spin axis - The tilt of the spin axis of the planet can vary by as much as 30 degrees over 11 years with respect to the plane of the binary star's orbit.

Compare that to the Earth's rotational precession, which is a far more modest 23.5 degrees over 26,000 years. This far-off planet is far-out and all of this complex movement leads to rapid and erratic changes in seasons.  That it is precessing on a human timescale is simply amazing. 

Population health has a lot of different factors - and infant mortality is one of them but it doesn't tell the entire story. Some in America laud Cuban health care, for example, but Cuba just had a cholera epidemic, something that doesn't happen in the United States.

And Cubans abort babies if there are signs of trouble, as do many industrialized nations, while America does not. Trying to save more babies is one reason why America ranks 27th among industrialized nations in infant mortality, and if you are in the business of criticizing American health care, you can stop thinking critically right there. 

Does home field advantage matter? In baseball outfielders, the tricks and corners of a new baseball park might be meaningful but that effect should diminish over time. The Seattle Seahawks have a famously loud stadium and the team calls the audience "the twelfth man" but they didn't need it to rout the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl.

There are no athletes in the Olympics who are from Sochi, yet psychologists believe that Russian athletes will have a psychological edge, even though Russia covers 6,600,000 million square miles, because they have a home field advantage.

Organic farms support more biodiversity, supporting 34% more plant, insect and animal species than conventional farms, according to a new paper. For pollinators such as bees, the number of different species was 50% higher on organic farms, although the authors stress that the study only looked at 'species richness'.

A new survey finds that nearly half of HIV-infected teenagers and young adults don't seek treatment unless the disease advances, which can them at risk for dangerous infections and long-term complications. It is accepted that starting treatment as early as possible can go long way toward keeping the virus in check and prevent the cardiovascular, renal and neurological damage characteristic of poorly controlled HIV infection over time.

Those most likely to delay treatment until they had advanced infections were males, blacks and Hispanics, the paper in
JAMA Pediatrics

British people traveling abroad for medical treatment are often unaware of the potential health and financial consequences they could face - with sometimes catastrophic effects for individual patients.

More than 63,000 UK residents travel abroad for medical treatment each year but many are embarking on medical tourism without doing research about the risks involved. These include a lack of redress in many countries should things go wrong, and the costs of non-emergency care at home to rectify poor outcomes of treatments received overseas. Since the UK has government-controlled health care, individuals are personally liable for those costs.

People with high blood pressure are familiar with ACE inhibitors, drugs that widen blood vessels by limiting activity of ACE, angiotensin-converting enzyme, a naturally occurring protein found in tissues throughout the body. 

But high activity of ACE may sometimes be a good thing. A study conducted by Cedars-Sinai scientists found that genetically targeting certain immune blood cells to overproduce the enzyme broke down defective proteins in the brain associated with Alzheimer's disease and prevented cognitive decline in laboratory mice bred to model the disease.