Maintaining physical health brings a variety of benefits - including for the brain. A new study affirms that but also finds that lower IQ in teen years is correlated to a higher risk of dementia before the age of 60.

IQ doesn't really go up or down much so IQ at a young age isn't telling us much, but a study of one million young Swedish men included the data so it ended up being a factor.

  How did small bands of nomadic Mongol horsemen unite to conquer much of the world within a span of decades? A whole book could be written on that, and it probably will be, if a new "Indiana Jones" movie gets made using Genghis Khan.

The reasons are numerous and involve many different things but climate change is a less-considered one. Yet researchers studying the rings of ancient trees in mountainous central Mongolia say his conquest was likely due to nice weather. 

Research using satellite observations and ice thickness measurements gathered by NASA's Operation IceBridge is giving new insight into one of the processes causing Greenland's ice sheet to lose mass.

A team of scientists calculated the rate at which ice flows through Greenland's glaciers into the ocean, which gives a clearer picture of how glacier flow affects the Greenland Ice Sheet and shows that this dynamic process is dominated by a small number of glaciers.

Operation IceBridge has been measuring the thickness of many of Greenland's glaciers, which allowed researchers to make a more accurate calculation of ice discharge rates. Researchers calculated ice discharge rates for 178 Greenland glaciers more than one kilometer (0.62 miles) wide.

Aggressive marketing by raw milk proponents has included claims that raw milk is easier to stomach for for lactose-intolerant people but a pilot study from the Stanford University School of Medicine shows no meaningful difference in digestibility between raw and pasteurized milk.

It's no surprise that natural selection does not always take an evolutionary time scale. 

When thousands of knights died during the Crusades at Acre, natural selection was being channeled. Yes, there were still other mechanisms of evolution but when the available pool of people is changed, positive selection is changed also. Pinpointing that on a time scale can be tough but there has been much research into the factors that have influenced the human genome since the end of the last Ice Age and a team of anthropologists, geneticists and archaeologists have analyzed ancient DNA from skeletons and found that selection has had a significant effect on the human genome even in the past 5,000 years.

Alan Turing was long famous in computer science and then became notable due to his sexuality and its controversy in England. Less well known is his work in biology and chemistry.

During World War II, Turing helped cracked the German Enigma Code, which made it possible to decipher enemy transmissions.  After the war, he was convicted of homosexuality — a criminal offense in England — and sentenced to chemical castration.  Shortly after his trial, and before he killed himself in 1954, he published a biology paper, "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis."