Electronic cigarettes have gained considerable popularity over the past few years - for most they are another form of the nicotine patch, and a way to curb harmful cigarette smoking but critics contend they make smoking cool.

No one thinks they are cool, they are in Google Glass territory among the public, just a moment away from leading to insults, so research instead focuses on the well-documented health benefits of smoking less versus any possible risks.

Governments want to regulate them to generate revenue so the onus is on the industry to try and prove they are safe, an impossible task. Yet if they show they are not harmful, it will be harder to convince the public they should regulate those when alternative medicine is unchecked.

Bumblebees can glean differences in pollen quality based on floral features like petal color and that informs their decision on where to land.

Bees do not sample pollen so it has been unclear how they determined quality. The new study in the Journal of Experimental Biology found that they are able to form associative relationships between appearance and pollen quality. Bumblebees can individually assess pollen samples and discriminate between them during collection, quickly forming preferences for a particular type of pollen.

Pollen foraging behavior involves learning and individual decision-making, which may allow bees to quickly learn which flowers provide the most nutritious pollen rewards for rearing their young, the authors write. 

Diverticulitis was once the refrain of a Saturday Night Live skit but it isn't funny to people who have it.  

A paper in Quality of Life Research has interviews with diverticulitis patients and it confirms that many suffer psychological and physical symptoms long after their acute illness has passed.

Schrödinger's cat is one of the famous examples of the weirdness of quantum mechanics  

The thought puzzle is that you put a cat inside a box and make its life dependent on a random event, when does the cat die? When the random event occurs, or when you open the box?

Millennials are redefining adulthood by living at home and getting supported by their parents longer than ever - and in the future it may turn into outright exploitation.

It used to be that family watched out for shysters out to bilk their parents but now the nearly 5 percent elderly American adults being financially exploited are often exploited by family members - poor and black people the most. 

Dr. Janey Peterson of Weill Cornell Medical College led one of the largest American studies ever done on elder abuse and the results appeared in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. 

Toddlers who did not frolic and smile and laugh were once called pensive or shy or quiet but now a Preschool Feelings Checklist
can label kids as depressed at 3 years of age. 

Using that as a factual basis, a paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry has found that depressed preschoolers were 2.5 times more likely to suffer from the condition in elementary and middle school than kids who were not diagnosed as depressed at very young ages.

Doctors and scientists maintain that children as young as 3 or 4 can not be clinically depressed.