Genital warts prevalence in Australian women plummeted 59% since a nationally funded quadrivalent human papillomarivus (HPV) vaccination program
 for teen and pre-teen girls was introduced in 2007, says a paper in BMJ.

The Kepler mission revealed the existence of potentially habitable planets slightly bigger than Earth. 

The spacecraft named for Johannes Kepler was launched in 2009 and now it has found two new planetary systems, Kepler-62 and Kepler-69, about 1,200 light years from Earth that include three super-Earth-size planets in the "habitable zone," the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water. 

The Kepler-62 system has five planets; 62b, 62c, 62d, 62e and 62f. The Kepler-69 system has two planets; 69b and 69c. Kepler-62e, 62f and 69c are the super-Earth-sized planets.

In quantum physics, objects can be in more than one place at a time and future events can change the past - don't get caught up too much in that or you won't sleep at night.

A new paper says quantum physics can be even spookier. Using the “chained” quantum Zeno effect, the researchers write that they have discovered a form of "almost psychic communication" in which information can be exchanged between two parties without photons, or any physical particles, traveling between them.

With 25,000 journals in existence today, thanks in large part to the open access movement which charges a fee to print a study, keeping up with current scientific literature is a daunting task. Hundreds to thousands of papers are published each day.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a text-mining algorithm to prioritize research papers to read and include in their Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD), a public database that manually curates and codes data from the scientific literature describing how environmental chemicals interact with genes to affect human health.

In America, a person who cuts your hair for $8 has to be licensed and obey minimum safety standards, but dietary supplements, which accounted for more than half the Class 1 drugs recalled by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from 2004-12 (meaning they contained substances that could cause serious health problems or even death) are stuffed full of  unapproved medicinal ingredients, including steroids,  a new study from St. Michael's Hospital has found.

The majority of those recalled supplements were bodybuilding, weight loss or sexual enhancement products, said the study's lead author, Dr. Ziv Harel, and almost one-quarter of the substances are manufactured outside of the United States, he said in the paper.

Research has established that caffeine interferes with processes in cancer cells that control DNA repair, a finding that has generated interest in using the stimulant as a chemotherapy treatment, but given the toxic nature of caffeine at high doses, researchers from the University of Alberta have instead taken advantage of caffeine's lethal effects on cancer cells identify genes and pathways responsible for DNA repair.

The research team found that fruit flies with a mutant gene called melanoma antigen gene, or MAGE, appeared normal when fed a regular diet but died when fed food supplemented with caffeine. On closer inspection, they found the mutant flies' cells were super-sensitive to caffeine, with the drug triggering "cell suicide" - apoptosis.