If you have bad breath and it hasn't been an issue your entire life, the most common cause may be that garlic and Limburger cheese sandwich you ate at lunch, but sometimes it's not a lifestyle issue. It could be an oral issue but it could also be a stomach one.

When you are making a model it is common to make assumptions about the physical systems often assume that measurable features of the system. Temperature or chemical potential can be specified. The real world is messier than that, and uncertainty is unavoidable. Temperatures fluctuate, instruments malfunction, the environment interferes, and systems evolve over time.

Statistical physics address the uncertainty about the state of a system that arises when that system interacts with its environment but a new paper says that uncertainty in the thermodynamic parameters themselves — built into equations that govern the energetic behavior of the system — may also influence the outcome of an experiment.

It is commonly said that Neptune is azure blue and Uranus pale cyan green – but a new study shows the two ice giants are actually far closer in color than typically thought. Because Uranus’ appearance and color has changed over the decades in response to the weirdest seasons in the Solar System.

If you're holding back on revealing negative secrets about yourself, new survey results in a social psychology journal say you can relax; most people don't care.

When study participants pushed through fear to reveal a secret, those in whom they confided were significantly more charitable than they expected. This was a marketing experiment, not real life, but the authors say recipients appreciated the trust, honesty, and vulnerability needed to reveal secrets.

Here are some findings.

Bipolar disorder, a mental illness with both manic and depressed moods, is often resulting in earlier death than others, by up to 15 years. In two groups, people with bipolar disorder were four to six times more likely as people without the condition to die prematurely, while people who had ever smoked were about twice as likely to die prematurely than those who had never smoked – whether or not they had bipolar disorder.

When it comes to bipolar disorder, the differences in health and lifestyle change mortality a lot.

An examination of more than 300 sudden, unexpected deaths in young children, which usually occur during sleep,  commonly known as SIDS in babies or SUDC in toddlers, including extensive medical record analysis and video evidence donated by families to document the inexplicable deaths of seven toddlers between the ages of 1 and 3 finds they were potentially attributable to seizures. 

These seizures lasted less than 60 seconds and occurred within 30 minutes immediately prior to each child’s death, say the study authors.