Vampires, ghouls, zombies, they have become part of Western burial imagery even though they originated elsewhere. Yet concern about the dead rising from their graves was evident long before tales arrived from Romania or Haiti. From the 11th to 14th centuries AD, medieval people in England likely believed strongly enough in animated corpses they actually took measures to prevent it.

The bones come from the deserted medieval village of Wharram Percy, North Yorkshire, a site managed by English Heritage. There were a total of 137 bones representing the mixed remains of at least ten individuals. They were buried in a pit in the settlement part of the site.

Everyone knows the value of trees in the cycle of atmospheric life. They consumer carbon dioxide (CO2), the target of regulations for the last few decades.

But that's not the only way they keep us cool. Trees also impact climate by regulating the exchange of water and energy between the Earth's surface and the atmosphere, which should be important considerations as policymakers contemplate efforts to conserve forested land.

Let's be honest, most human dads do less work raising the kids than human moms. That's not true in all species, though. In a few, fathers care for their developing embryos more than mothers, and biologists speculated that this paternal devotion had evolved from ancestors entirely lacking parental care.

A new paper provides a new wrinkle. When fathers are more involved, parental care gets a lot more elaborate.

Cookbooks are popular. Cookbooks are instructional.

But they are woefully lacking information about a vital thing - food safety. An analysis of 1,497 recipes from 29 cookbooks that appeared on the New York Times best sellers list for food and diet books, all of which included handling raw animal ingredients, such as meat, poultry, seafood or eggs, didn't note food safety much at all.

Specifically, the researchers looked for three things:

* Did the recipe tell readers to cook the dish to a specific internal temperature?

If you read the claims of environmental groups, trace levels of chemicals are the source of most cancers, even if they are well below harmful levels, due to vague claims of "bioaccumulation." If you read the recent claims of the EPA, air pollution is causing acute deaths, even though the United States has some of the cleanest air in the world and no one can find any deaths it has caused during the entire existence of the EPA.

Politicians are arguing with each other about health care. One side is yelling that people have coverage, even if they can't afford to use it and twice as many people will lose than ever got it. Another side claims emergency room visits and pediatric care are a luxury.

What is clear is that something needs to be fixed. 

While advocates for the ACA will say that only 6 to 8 percent of US health care expenditures are primary care, critics argue that we already had the best in the world. What is clear to all is that payment models introduced under the Affordable Care Act raised expectations for patients and doctors, but any gains were modest.