Bullying and violence are the latest cultural magnet for administrators in schools around the country, but the solution may not be paid commercials, more books or talks in the gym - it may be as simple as embracing team sports again.

At the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Washington, D.C., researchers discussed their analysis of data from the 2011 North Carolina Youth Risk Behavior Survey to see if athletic participation was associated with violence-related behaviors, including fighting, carrying a weapon and being bullied. A representative sample of 1,820 high school students in the state completed the survey, which also asked adolescents whether they played any school-sponsored team sports (e.g., football) or individual sports (e.g. track).

Natural emissions and man-made pollutants have an unexpected effect; they make clouds brighter and have a cooling effect on the world's climate.

A quick primer: Clouds are made of water droplets, condensed on to tiny particles suspended in the air. When the air is humid enough, the particles swell into cloud droplets. It has been known for some decades that the number of these particles and their size control how bright the clouds appear from the top, controlling the efficiency with which clouds scatter sunlight back into space. A major challenge for climate science has been trying to understand and quantify these effects, which have a major impact in polluted regions.

Researchers were able to controll seizures in epileptic mice with a one-time transplantation of medial ganglionic eminence (MGE) cells into the hippocampus, which inhibit signaling in overactive nerve circuits.

Cell therapy has become a focus of epilepsy research, in part because current medications, even when effective, only control symptoms and not underlying causes of the disease, according to Scott C. Baraban, PhD of UC San Francisco, who led the new study. In many types of epilepsy, he said, current drugs have no therapeutic value at all.

Since marijuana is fast becoming legal again in America, it seems strange to be calling cigarettes a 'gateway' to it, but anti-smoking campaigns are almost as large a business as tobacco and so a paper at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Washington, D.C., today supports the notion that cigarettes are a gateway to marijuana. 

And, like everyone who picks a position and then wants data to support it, they used surveys of students. They found that students who smoked marijuana smoked more cigarettes than those who just smoked cigarettes. Cigarettes are so demonized a successful public relations campaign against drugs might be that it leads to more smoking. That will likely work far better than a fried egg in a television commercial.

In the UK, health care is nationalized but a trial lawyer for maternity cases says that has made money a bigger concern in deciding who gets quality medical care. 

A report by The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) said there was enormous disparity in the quality of care patients received across the country. It looked at the performance of maternity units in England during 2011/12 and found that rates of inductions, emergency cesareans and assisted deliveries were twice as high in some hospitals as others.

We all know time is relative, just like we know that the plates are moving around underneath us, but both time and that the earth is not moving still 'ground' us on a daily basis.