Sometimes it's just public relations. We subsidize nicotine patches but regulators are increasingly interested in banning electronic cigarettes.

Such misguided legislation, not backed by sound data, may have consequences for public health, experts say. With smoking blamed for up to six million premature deaths each year, a lot is at stake in the newest push for regulations.

A new paper correlates brain activity with how people make decisions.

Based on these images, the authors suggest that when individuals engage in risky behavior, such as drunk driving or unsafe sex, it's not because their brains' desire systems are too active, but because their self-control systems are not active enough. 

Defense lawyers now have a new way to make criminal behavior exculpatory. Unless the judge knows something about the weaknesses of inferring cause and effect based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and read this article about how mainstream media love weak observational studies because they make for catchy headlines.

Most medications prescribed in primary care contain animal derived products.

Are they suitable for vegetarians?

Dietary preferences are common in the general population. Influences such as religion, culture, economic status, environmental concern and personal preferences all play a part in the foods that people choose to consume. Most doctors are unaware that commonly prescribed drugs contain animal products and would be surprised that it matters. But most patients are not aware either and if they have a dietary preference it might impact the medicines they are willing to take also. 

The nature of social science is that you will frequently find papers arguing contradictory positions, and nothing shows that like video games. On Science 2.0 alone, you can find dozens of studies arguing both sides.

Mirjana Bajovic of Brock University quizzed a group of eighth-graders (aged 13–14) about their playing habits and patterns and determined their stage of moral reasoning using an established scale of one to four. The goal was to determine if there was a link between the types of video games teens played, how long they played them, and the teens’ levels of moral reasoning: their ability to take the perspective of others into account. 

Lorena Moscardelli of Statoil North America–Research, Development and Innovation in Austin is not the first to claim evidence to support the existence of a Martian ocean during the late Hesperian–early Amazonian. Viking Orbiter images did that throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

Others have based their beliefs on alleged paleoshorelines, which has been heavily contested due to large variations in elevation (and some turned out to be of volcanic origin), but Moscardelli uses a new terrestrial, deep-water analogy. 

The increasing use of chemical herbicides, both synthetic and organic kinds, is often blamed for the declining plant biodiversity in farms, but it is simplistic to think herbicide exposure is solely to blame.

The science doesn't add up. If herbicides are a key factor in declining diversity, then thriving species would be more tolerant to widely used herbicides than rare or declining species, according to J. Franklin Egan, research ecologist, USDA-Agricultural Research Service. But that isn't the case.