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Here's Where Your Backyard Was 300 Million Years Ago

We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology...

Convergent Evolution Cheat Sheet Now 120 Million Years Old

One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than...

Synchrotron Could Shed Light On Exotic Dark Photons

There are many hypothetical particles proposed to explain dark matter and one idea to explore how...

The Pain Scale Is Broken But This May Fix It

Chronic pain is reported by over 20 percent of the global population but there is no scientific...

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Browsing Facebook has become a daily activity for hundreds of millions of people. Because so many people engage with the website daily, researchers are interested in how emotionally involved Facebook users can be with the social networking site and how regular use can affect their mental health.

Now, journalism scholars at the University of Missouri did a survey of more than 700 college students and found that Facebook use can lead to symptoms of depression if the social networking site triggers feelings of envy among its users. Margaret Duffy, a professor and chair of strategic communication at the MU School of Journalism, says that how Facebook users use the site makes a difference in how they respond to it.
Micro-imprinting and electro-spinning techniques have led to the ability to create a vascular graft composed of three layers and this tri-layer composite means the ability utilize separate materials that respectively possess mechanical strength and promote new cell growth - a significant problem for existing vascular grafts that have only consisted of a single or double layer.

One in three people say they would risk living a shorter life instead of taking a daily pill to prevent cardiovascular disease, according to new research.

The scholars surveyed 1,000 people (average age 50) via the Internet hypothetically asking how much time they were willing to forfeit at the end of their lives to avoid taking daily medication.

They were also asked the amount of money they would pay and the hypothetical risk of death they were willing to accept to avoid taking medications to prevent cardiovascular disease.

The survey showed:

Does only spending what you make lead to suicide? In the world of weak observational studies, it can. Suicides in Greece reached a 30 year all-time high in 2012, with a sustained upward trend starting in June 2011, the month that the government introduced austerity measures to get loans and help pay down the country's debts, currently at 175 percent of GDP and caused by overspending on social services. 
15 years ago, the name "Aidan" was barely a blip on the radar of Americans with new babies, ranking a lowly 324th on the Social Security Administration's list of popular baby names.

Then a popular character with that name was on the television show "Sex and the City" and though fathers dreaded that their child was going to have the same name as some other child of a mother who watched the show, it happened all across America anyway. Since then, that name has been in the top 20.
A brilliant-green sea slug can live for months at a time "feeding" on sunlight like a plant and now scientists have the first direct evidence that its chromosomes have some genes that come from the algae it eats. 

Those genes help sustain photosynthetic processes inside the slug that provide it with all the food it needs. 

Importantly, this is one of the only known examples of functional gene transfer from one multicellular species to another, which is the goal of gene therapy to correct genetically based diseases in humans.