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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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Silent strokes are a loss of blood flow to parts of the brain. Such strokes do not cause immediate symptoms and typically go undiagnosed, but they cause damage. In kids, they can even lower IQ.

One form of drug counseling to help young people with drinking problems makes people in a 'we must do something' culture feel better may be of limited benefit, a new systematic review suggests. 

Each year, around 320,000 people worldwide between the ages of 15 and 29 die as a result of alcohol misuse. Most of those deaths are due to car accidents, murders, suicides or drowning. Motivational interviewing is a counseling technique developed in the 1980s that is sometimes offered to people with alcohol problems. It aims to help them overcome ambivalence and change behavior. Counselors listen, adopt a non-judgmental, non-confrontational stance and then highlight the negative consequences of drinking. 

Carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) was once used in dry cleaning and as a fire-extinguishing agent but once it was found to be a cause of ozone depleted, it was regulated in 1987 under the Montreal Protocol along with other chlorofluorocarbons. Parties to the Montreal Protocol have reported zero new CCl4 emissions since, though worldwide emissions of CCl4 still average 39 kilotons per year, about 30 percent of emissions prior to the treaty going into effect.

A brain imaging study that looked at chronic users of codeine-containing cough syrups found deficits in specific regions of brain white matter and associates these changes with increased impulsivity in
codeine-containing cough syrup
users. 

For most people, the Jurassic period conjures up images of huge dinosaurs chomping their way through lush vegetation and each other. 

But mammals and their immediate ancestors were also around 201 to 145 million years ago, just not as spectacular as we are now. 

Early Jurassic mammals were thought to have been confined to the ecological margins, eating whatever insects they could find. However, this was also the time when new mammal characteristics – such as better hearing and teeth capable of precise chewing – were developing. So, if the earliest mammals were all small generalized insectivores, where was the competition driving the evolution of such features?

Cornell University marketing researchers recently tracked the purchasing records in a supermarket chain that uses the Guiding Stars System to rate the nutritional value of foods for sale.