New studies indicate the three drugs used to treat male impotence,  phosphodiesterase Type 5 inhibitors  Viagra, Levitra and Cialis also appear to work in females, albeit a little differently, and might be worth a second look to potentially help the 40 percent of women who report sexual dysfunction, researchers say.

In one of the first studies of the effect of the phosphodiesterase Type 5 inhibitors on the pudendal arteries that supply the penis, vagina and clitoris the blood needed to produce a satisfying sexual experience, Medical College of Georgia researchers showed the drugs relax the artery in male and female rats. 

If you're a man and have Lou Gehrig's Disease - Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) - there is good news if you drink caffeine.   Antioxidants, such as in coffee, can help.   The bad news is you still have ALS and there is no caffeine benefit for women found so far.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a fatal disease that damages key neurons in the brain and spinal cord. The disease causes progressive paralysis of voluntary muscles and often death within five years of symptoms. Although ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) was discovered over a century ago, neither the cause nor a cure have been found, but several mechanisms seem to play a role in its development, including oxidative stress.

According to lore (because apparently before the Internet, if it appeared in writing it had to be true) diarist Samual Pepes originally said, "Laughter is the best medicine."

On a science site, we are inclined to note that 'medicine is the best medicine' - but studies have shown that laughter can't hurt ... and it may help.

How many times have you had some pithy comment in prose be misinterpreted when you just know that if the other people could simply hear your voice or see your face they would know how brilliant you are?

It happens a lot and emoticons, along with their evil cousin ALL CAPITALIZATION AND !!! PUNCTUATION, were invented to try and close the communications gap.  

Now European researchers at the PASION project have developed a suite of tools to add non-verbal cues to email, phone calls, chats and other channels of electronic communication.   Digital communication hasn’t the richness of face-to-face conversation because it cannot communicate the non-verbal cues and contextual information that are so important to us all.

Women get more knee injuries than men and new research from the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary say there may be a connection between the laxity of a woman's knee joint and her monthly hormone cycle.

The research project — a collaboration between kinesiology, engineering and health sciences researchers — has found that not all woman experience knee laxity at the same time of their menst rual cycle. The researchers speculate that this is likely why previous research in the area has largely discounted a connection between the hormone cycle and knee injury.

The most crowded collision of galaxy clusters has been identified by combining information from three different telescopes. This result gives scientists a chance to learn what happens when some of the largest objects in the Universe go at each other in a cosmic free-for-all.

Using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, astronomers were able to determine the three-dimensional geometry and motion in the system MACSJ0717.5+3745 (or MACSJ0717 for short) located about 5.4 billion light years from Earth.