The economic downtown that began in 2008 has been hardest on the mental health of men in England - yet it isn't the actual unemployment and falling household income the authors blame. They blame the threat of losing their jobs in a society that places an unrealistic level of pressure on males to be the breadwinners.

They base their findings on data taken from the national representative annual Health Survey for England for adults aged 25 to 64, between 1991 and 2010.  Response rates during the period varied from 85 per cent in 1991 to 64 per cent in 2008, and included almost 107,000 people.

Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory may have discovered why so little that makes sense results from political meetings - moderately high indoor concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂) can significantly impair people's decision-making performance. 

In 1428 AD, while King Alfonso V was ordering Sicilian Jews into conversion sermons and the Ottomans were consolidating in Europe, the city-states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan formed the Triple Alliance, which became the Aztec empire and ruled the Valley of Mexico until the Spaniards arrived a century later. 

The term 'Aztec' has become a little confusing since then. There were no 'Aztec' people, the people of Mexico primarily made up what were later called Aztecs, and the Aztecs were made up of many cultures, they were just dominated by conquering city-states. Historians call such a structure a hegemonic empire as compared to the traditional meaning like with Rome or Mongolia.

Giving a hard number as a critical threshold for dangerous climate change -  temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius - has not helped climate negotiations. 

The USA, for example, has led the developed world in reducing emissions from energy, though to be fair the anti-nuclear stance of the US led to runaway emissions from the 1980s on so things are now only getting back to even there. Yet for all the emissions the US has reduced, the rest of the world has accelerated. China is the world's top polluter but has been exempt from all negotiations because it is considered a developing nation, the same goes for India and Mexico.

Citizens who were told routine health checks were too expensive and so people did not get them, to the detriment of their health and higher costs later, just got good and bad news; the good news is that a new review says people don't need them. The bad news is that will be a reason not to have them available when the Affordable Care Act goes into force.

Check-ups don't reduce overall deaths or prevent serious diseases like cancer and heart disease, according to Cochrane researchers who carried out a systematic review on the subject. They warn against offering general health checks as part of a public health program, which is the opposite of what Americans have been told by the medical community for decades.

A planet around the mass of the Earth has been found, orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system; the nearest to Earth and also the lightest exoplanet ever discovered around a star like the Sun.