Banner
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...

User picture.
News StaffRSS Feed of this column.

News Releases From All Over The World, Right To You... Read More »

Blogroll

A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials on the effects of tree nuts for metabolic syndrome found a "modest decrease" in blood fats known as triglycerides and blood sugars compared to those who ate a control diet. 

 Tree nuts are such things as almonds, Brazil nuts, cashews, chestnuts, coconuts, hazelnuts, pecans, macadamia nuts, walnuts, pine nuts and pistachios and appear to help reduce two of the five markers for metabolic syndrome, a group of factors that raise the risk for heart disease and other health problems such as diabetes and strokes, a new research paper says. 

Sorry Mr. Peanut, you are not on the list because you are a legume.

Folate is a naturally occurring form of vitamin B found in food, while folic acid is synthetically produced and used in fortified foods and supplements. Taking folic acid before and during early pregnancy is linked to a reduction in the risk of neural tube defects like spina bifida. The current recommended dose is 400 ìg (micrograms) a day though it is unclear how much daily folic acid is needed to prevent neural tube defects.

One of the most promising aspects of a Science 2.0 future is not just being able to analyze trillions of data points or getting the public to help with biology, but making more accurate models using much larger data sets. Big data.

For older people, and farsighted people, watching television while also reading this article can be challenging experiences because the eyes do not adjust. So people wear glasses down on their nose to read while they watch something farther away.

It's the 21st century, The Future of Back To The Future is a year away, it's time to ditch spectacles and make the computer screens wear the glasses instead of people.

In the 1800s, mentally ill people were in jail. Then they were put in more humane mental hospitals. But then mental hospitals got vilified in mainstream news stories and horror movies and they were closed and now mentally ill people are back in jails, 10 times as many as are in mental health facilities.

Policy makers don't buy that psychology has value any more, and they feel only slightly better about psychiatry. Scrutiny and abuse has led politicians to demand tighter Medicaid policies governing antipsychotic drugs and a new paper links those tighter policies to increased incarceration rates for schizophrenics. 

As the climate warms and sea ice retreats, the North is changing. An ice-covered expanse now has a season of increasingly open water which is predicted to extend across the whole Arctic Ocean before the middle of this century. Storms thus have the potential to create Arctic swell – huge waves that could add a new and unpredictable element to the region.
A University of Washington researcher made the first study of waves in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, and detected house-sized waves during a September 2012 storm. 

"As the Arctic is melting, it's a pretty simple prediction that the additional open water should make waves," said lead author Jim Thomson, an oceanographer with the UW Applied Physics Laboratory.