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By Philip Ball of Nature magazine Rainfall soothes the atmosphere, atmospheric scientists have found. [More]

Walter Reed Hospital Flu Ward during 1918 flu pandemic.

In the lab, female rodents sometimes terminate their pregnancies after being exposed to new males. It’s called the Bruce effect, for researcher Hilda Bruce. Now a study in the journal Science [link to come] finds that the Bruce effect occurs in the wild, and likely ups evolutionary fitness.

“ No such hypothesis is sufficient to explain either the cataclysms or the glacial phenomena; and we need not hesitate to confess our ignorance of this strange, this mysterious, episode in the history of the globe…. ” BRISTOW, H.G. (1872): The world before the deluge by Louis Figuier – Newly edited and revised by H.W

There's a scene in Pixar's Finding Nemo when Dory, a yellow-finned regal tang, injures herself in a tug-of-war over a snorkel mask. A tiny plume of blood curls away from Dory's face into the water around her, where it is sucked into the nostrils of Bruce, a "vegetarian" shark who immediately recants his no-sushi policy. (Fortunately, Dory escapes.) Scientists have known for some time that many ocean predators relish the scent of an injured fish, whereas fish that are more likely to end up as a meal flee from the same scent

Overeating has been linked to a litany of health problems--diabetes, high blood pressure and stroke, to name a few. Memory loss , dementia and even Alzheimer's may someday be added to that list, according to the preliminary findings of a study on aging conducted by the Mayo Clinic . [More]

Each morning, a nametag would turn up missing. They went missing at some point during the nights, when nobody was around to notice. Each time one went missing, of course, it would be replaced

On a late afternoon in Dec

ADHD isn t just kids being kids.

Could the ultimate smart gadget for accessing the Web, messaging and making phone calls be…a pair of eyeglasses? We may know by the end of the year.

Mental health care is one of the biggest unmet needs of our time. Nearly one in two people in the U.S. will suffer from depression, anxiety disorders or another mental health ailment at some point in their life, and about one in 17 Americans currently has a serious mental illness

Too much sun, smoking and a poor diet can make us look older.

A data transmission problem? (Wikipedia/BigRiz) Although still awaiting full confirmation, a breaking news report in Science (and Nature , see below) indicates that the measurement of an apparently faster-than-light travel time for muon-neutrinos generated at CERN and detected at the Gran Sasso laboratory – which hit the world headlines back in September 2011 – may have been due to a problematic physical connection between a fiber-optic cable and an electronics card in a computer.

It’s easy to find an online test that will purportedly tell you how happy you are. But how happy are the people of an entire nation

The detector at the Gran Sasso end of the OPERA experiment. Credit: OPERA The faster-than-light neutrinos seen by the OPERA particle physics experiment last year may have just been explained. By a loose cable.