The gap between hypothesis and observation is never more evident than efforts to figure out howblack holes produce so many high-power X-rays.

The big question in many aspects of medicine is whether there is more of something or if it is simply better diagnosis than in the past.

In youth baseball programs, throwing injuries seem to have gone up despite pitching limits that weren't evident in the past. Professional baseball once used a four-man rotation and there was no consideration at all about pitching for kids.

But a multicenter, national research study says serious pitching injuries requiring surgery have skyrocketed, with one estimate reporting serious throwing injuries are occurring 16 times more often today than just 30 years ago.

Water in the Earth's upper mantle and crust likely plays a less important role as a lubricant of plate tectonics than previously assumed, according to a paper presented by geoscientists present in the current issue of Nature (13/06/2013) after the examination of water in the mineral olivine.

Laboratory experiments over the past three decades have suggested the presence of water greatly weakens the mechanical strength of the mineral olivine, a key component of the Earth's upper mantle.

In the recent study, led by the Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Bayreuth, the Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer (SIMS) facility at the Potsdam based GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences was used to reassess the importance of water in defining the rigidity of olivine. 

In the last two generations, the designation 'spiritual but not religious' has become popular. It's hard to know what it means - atheists and religious people are at least taking some sort of stand - but one thing sociologists say they do know: Young adults who deem themselves "spiritual but not religious" are more likely to commit both violent and property crimes than young people who self-report religious belief ("religious and spiritual" or "religious but not spiritual").

Parasites comprise a large proportion of the diversity of species in every ecosystem but they are rarely included in analyses or models of food webs.  Would it make a difference?

A new paper says that
including parasites does alter the structure of food webs, but that most changes occur because of an increase in diversity and complexity, rather than from unique characteristics of parasites.

If you watch musicals from the 1950s or teen comedies from the 1990s, you find a lot of movies with different titles but the themes and plotlines barely change; two friends competing for a girl in the former or some teen wants to improve another teen, who becomes really popular, in the latter.

It's not that Hollywood lacks imagination, we are naturally drawn toward a specific set of universal narratives within cultural products, says a new paper. We have evolved to like stories about Superman saving strangers or Brad Pitt fighting zombies.