In 2015, 4,528 "children" - the mean age was 18, pediatricians presenting at the Pediatric Academic Societies 2018 annual meeting today counted children as anyone under age 21 - died from firearm-related injuries. Eighty-seven percent were male and 44 percent were black.  And the pediatricians argue that background checks and thus waiting periods to buy ammunition might help lower those incidents.

It sounds gross to humans - unless you read those "Twilight" books in which case maybe it's sexy - but a lot of animals consume blood.  That's right, even your cat familiar. 

The question is why? Blood is actually a poor source of energy. It consists of 78 percent liquid and what is left is 93 percent proteins and only one percent carbohydrates (1). Blood provides very little in the way of vitamins. Not only that, a blood-based diet exposes animals to blood-borne pathogens.

And yet some bat species (order Chiroptera) feed exclusively on blood and have managed to survive evolution that should have killed them, and their reliance on low-grade nourishment, off.

Many people are addicted to a stimulant. Lawyer-driven groups like Center for Science in the Public Interest have long wanted to sue coffee companies over caffeine but haven't gained much traction despite their efforts to claim it causes things like breast cancer.

If you offer a wealthy elite any fish that is not gathered by depleting the oceans, they will recoil in horror. It is unclear why they recognize that farms are essential for growing vegetables but think farmed fish should only be for the poor. 

The science says otherwise. Aquatic farming -- aquaculture -- can help feed the future global population while substantially reducing one of the biggest environmental impacts of protein production -- land use -- without requiring people to entirely abandon protein as a food source.

The South Atlantic Anomaly has people concerned, but if Earth's magnetic field of the past is any indication, and it is, the anomaly is not a precursor of a switching of the poles.

What is the South Atlantic Anomaly?

A small study published in Hypertension resurrects the notion that oral antioxidants, broadly dismissed as ineffective, could reap measurable health benefits if they are bioavailable. And it was in older people.

The study consisted of 20 healthy men and women age 60 to 79 from the Boulder area. Half took a placebo and half took 20 milligrams per day of a commercially available supplement called MitoQ, which is Coenzyme Q10 which uses chemistry to allow the antioxidant to penetrate the membrane of mitochondria, the energy factories of our cells.