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.

People with cystic fibrosis suffer repeated lung infections because their airway mucus is too thick and sticky to keep bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens from causing chronic infection. How mucus becomes abnormal in cystic fibrosis airways has never been fully understood, but a new study has determined that mucin proteins, which give mucus its gel-like properties, fail to unfold normally in cystic fibrosis airways, making airway mucus much more thick and sticky than it would be otherwise.

Cystic fibrosis is a rare genetic disease that affects about 70,000 people worldwide. It occurs when a person has two defective copies of the CFTR gene, which triggers the creation of the CFTR protein. When that protein is mutated, the result is cystic fibrosis.