As a child, you may have been fascinated to learn that draining the water from a bathtub causes a spinning tornado to appear.

That or gravity may have been your first introduction to classical mechanics. As the water rotated faster, a vortex appeared.

Yet if the water is extremely cold liquid helium, the fluid will swirl around an invisible line to form a vortex that obeys the laws of quantum mechanics. Sometimes, two of these quantum tornadoes flex into curved lines, cross over one another to form a letter X shape, swap ends, and then violently retract from one another—a process called reconnection.

Can you explain what a deductible is?

If you can, you are in the majority - but not by much. Instead, survey results have found that the people most likely to benefit from the Affordable Care Act, those earning near the Federal Poverty Level, remain the most clueless about health care policies. 

There is a week to go before enrollment in mandatory health care closes and to-date most of the discussion has revolved around technical glitches, exaggerated enrollment, doctors and health plans throwing out patients and alarming costs for most of the public.

Bosses who are most conscientious about the fairness of workplace decisions make their workers happier and their companies more productive, but they may be burning themselves out.

A new paper found the act of carefully monitoring the fairness of workplace decisions wears down supervisors mentally and emotionally.  The researchers surveyed 82 bosses twice a day for a few weeks. Managers who reported mental fatigue from situations involving procedural fairness were less cooperative and socially engaging with other workers the next day. 

(Millbrook, NY) People living in northern and central parts of the U.S. are more likely to contract Lyme disease and other tick-borne ailments when white-footed mice are abundant. Mice are effective at transferring disease-causing pathogens to feeding ticks. And, according to an in-press paper in the journal Ecology, these "super hosts" appear indifferent to larval tick infestations.

Drawing on 16 years of field research performed at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, the paper found that white-footed mice with hundreds of larval ticks survived just as long as those with only a few ticks. Even more surprising, male mice with large tick loads were more likely to survive during a given season.

The researchers found that p53 limits invasion by initiating a chain of events that ultimately prevents the formation of lamellipodia, cell membrane protrusions that spur cell movement and invasion. p53 activates a mitochondrial protease called Omi, which is then released into the cytosol of the cell when Ras causes mitochondria to fragment. Omi cleaves actin filaments in the cytoskeleton, and the decrease in actin suppresses the activity of p130Cas, a focal adhesion signaling protein that promotes the formation of lamellipodia. With low levels of active p130Cas, cells don't form lamellipodia and are therefore less able to invade.

Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) in Boston have estimated that around one million children suffer from tuberculosis (TB) annually— twice the number previously thought to have tuberculosis and three times the number that are diagnosed every year. The researchers also estimated that around 32,000 children suffer from multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) annually. These findings are published in The Lancet on March 23, 2014.