Researchers have developed a new conceptual framework for understanding how stars similar to our Sun evolve. Their framework helps explain how the rotation of stars, their emission of x-rays, and the intensity of their stellar winds vary with time. According to first author Eric Blackman, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, the work could also "ultimately help to determine the age of stars more precisely than is currently possible."

Rather like an uncontacted tribe living deep in the Amazon rainforest or on an island in Oceania, WLM offers a rare insight into the primordial nature of galaxies that have been little disturbed by their environment.

WLM was discovered in 1909 by German astronomer Max Wolf, and identified as a galaxy some fifteen years later by astronomers Knut Lundmark and Philibert Jacques Melotte -- explaining the galaxy's unusual moniker. The dim galaxy is located in the constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster) about three million light-years away from the Milky Way, which is one of the three dominant spiral galaxies in the Local Group.

A group of scholars believed that "mindfulness" meditation, practiced as a way to calm the mind,
could be a non-drug alternative to help decrease chronic low back pain that is psychosomatic, and set out to show it. 

Claims of chronic low back pain are a costly condition that plagues eight in 10 Americans at some point in their lives. A team at Group Health Research Institute compared a specific kind of meditation called mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) along with cognitive behavioral therapy, a kind of talk therapy, to see if these interventions might alleviate pain.

Women who sunbathe are likely to live longer than those who avoid the sun, even though sunbathers are at an increased risk of developing skin cancer. This paradox baffles oncologists and has suggested that the war on sunshine has been unjustified.

In a study appearing in the March 22/29 issue of JAMA, Ann Marie Navar, M.D., Ph.D., of Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C., and colleagues examined how shared clinical trial data are being used. Concerns over bias in clinical trial reporting have stimulated calls for more open data sharing. In response, multiple pharmaceutical companies have created mechanisms for investigators to access patient-level clinical trials data.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A fungal disease that poses a serious threat to cacao plants - the source of chocolate - reproduces clonally, Purdue University researchers find.

The fungus Moniliophthora roreri causes frosty pod rot, a disease that has decimated cacao plantations through much of the Americas. Because M. roreri belongs to a group of fungi that produces mushrooms - the fruit of fungal sex - many researchers and cacao breeders believed the fungus reproduced sexually.