You need a biopsy, or some other kind of minimally invasive treatment, and you are feeling anxious. Nothing is likely to go wrong, but you're still worried. 

Would pre-procedure hypnosis help? Maybe. Soft music? Possibly. But a small study presented Monday at the Society of Interventional Radiology's 39th annual meeting, suggests that donning a pair of video glasses that displays a movie or television show only you can see is likely to help you the most. 

"Whether they were watching a children's movie or nature show, patients wearing video glasses were successful at tuning out their...

Between vaccine refusal, drug resistant strains of bacteria, and the growing ranks of the immuno-compromised, it sometimes seems that we humans are losing our brief moment of superiority in the unending arms race against pathogens. But a new technique has shown remarkable promise in mice infected with deadly forms of meningitis and pneumonia, and may point the way to regaining the upper hand against a wide range of infections.

A genetically reengineered version of an immune system protein called properdin appears to activate a robust immune response against invading pathogens, according to a...

There is strong evidence that medical marijuana pills may reduce symptoms of spasticity and pain reported by multiple sclerosis patients, but little proof that smoking pot offers the same benefit, according to new alternative treatment guidelines released by the American Academy of Neurology.

The guidelines on complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM, treatments for MS were published Monday in the journal Neurology and are among the first from a national medical organization to suggest that doctors might offer cannabis treatment to patients.

Though advocates of medical marijuana use said...

What does Thor's hammer weigh? Ten quadrillion pounds? 42.3 pounds? Less?

Among scientific laws is this one: Nerds will be nerds. So YouTube brainiacs Vsauce3 played "what if." What if Thor's hammer were made from a dying star instead of forged in a dying star (because we all know that's how it was made).

It would be inconceivably dense and heavy. Mayhem would ensue. It would attract human bodies faster than the speed of sound, ripping them apart with its pull. If the god of thunder were to set it down (say, to give his impressive muscles a rest), it would sink to the center of the Earth!  

Mj...

A fair amount of conversation about e-cigarettes has involved their use in purportedly helping people to quit smoking. Researchers on Monday said the evidence for that has been “unconvincing,” and they suggest that regulations should forbid such claims until there’s supporting research.

In a letter Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. Internal Medicine, researchers from the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education and the Department of Medicine at UC San Francisco noted that e-cigarettes are “aggressively promoted as smoking cessation aids.&...

Stressed out women have more difficulty getting pregnant than women with less stress, according to a new study this week in the journal Human Reproduction.

Although the relationship between stress and trouble getting pregnant has been hinted at before, it had never been scientifically proven before now. This new research marks the first time that scientists have found a direct link between stress and infertility.

"Women should not look at these findings and feel guilty," said Courtney Denning-Johnson Lynch, director of reproductive epidemiology at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical...

There’s more bad news about the effects of oil spills on warm-water predators, including Atlantic bluefin tuna, already one of the most threatened fish in the seas.

Oil spills such as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may cause serious heart defects in developing fish embryos, according to a study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The release of more than 4 million barrels of oil between April and July 2010 coincided with the spawning window for...

Our bones are remarkable feats of engineering; strong and yet light, shot through with holes and yet able to bear incredible loads. This super-strong natural material is built as cells incorporate hard minerals like calcium into living tissue. Now, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are borrowing this idea from nature: They’ve created living cells that incorporate inorganic matter like gold and quantum dots.

These bacterial factories, described in the journalNature Materials, could one day help create fully functional hybrid "living materials" that could be...

Now that spring is here, maybe it's time to grab your surfboard and head to some far-off coastline -- perhaps as far as the outer solar system. Scientists using NASA's Cassini spacecraft have found hints of waves sloshing on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon – the first time waves like those in Earth's oceans have ever been found on another world.

Titan is the second largest moon in the solar system, after Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, and it’s sometimes called a planet-like moon: It’s the only other world in our neighborhood to feature stable bodies of liquid on its...

When a major extinction takes place, apex predators — those giant beasts sitting at the top of the food web — are often the first to suffer. But it turns out that in the worst extinction event in Earth’s history, they might have actually branched out a little, according to a new study in PLoS ONE that looked at ancient armored amphibians and giant swimming reptiles.

While the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago was a violent and dramatic end, this end-Cretaceous event wasn't the worst extinction in Earth’s history. That dubious honor goes to...

Why do our eyes open wide when we feel fear or narrow to slits when we express disgust? According to new research, it has to do with survival.

In a paper published Thursday in the journal Psychological Science, researchers concluded that expressions of fear and disgust altered the way human eyes gather and focus light.

They argued that these changes were the result of evolutionary development and were intended to help humans survive, or at least detect, very different threats.

To test their hypothesis, study authors examined two dozen volunteer undergraduate students with standard eye-exam...

Breathe in deeply and feel the power of your nose. If your sense of smell is firing on all cylinders, you can distinguish among a dizzying array of 1 trillion different odors, according to a new study in the journal Science.

Bad perfume, baby skin, lavender rubbed between your fingers, real apple pie in the oven, and apple-pie-scented candles -- the diverse world of odor is yours for the smelling.

"Our sense of smell is amazing," said Leslie Vosshall, who studies olfaction at the Rockefeller University in New York City. "The whole point of this study is that humans are much better at smelling...

Phew! You may not have known it, but Earth barely missed the "perfect solar storm" that could have smashed into our magnetic field and wreaked havoc with our satellite systems, electronics and power systems, potentially causing trillions of dollars in damage, according to data from NASA’s STEREO-A spacecraft.

On July 22, 2012, STEREO-A spotted what looked like an enormous solar eruption sending out a coronal mass ejection at blazing top speeds of roughly 1,800 miles per second – the fastest ever recorded by the spacecraft. By the time it actually passed STEREO-A a mere 17 hours...

With their extraordinary ability to mimic twigs and leaves, stick insects are among nature's most renowned masters of disguise. 

But it's not just predators they've managed to avoid. Sneaky phasmatodae, or "ghost" insects, have also flummoxed scientists by leaving behind precious few fossil clues concerning their unique evolution.

But on Wednesday, researchers from China, France and Germany announced the discovery of a long-extinct species that lived around Inner Mongolia roughly 126 million years ago.

The insect, dubbed Cretophasmomima melanogramma, was described in  the journal PLOS One and...

A dinosaur, nicknamed the "chicken from hell," was described by a team of paleontologists in a study released Wednesday, and researchers say it is even stranger then they first imagined.

The dinosaur's official name is Anzu wyliei, but it was nicknamed the chicken from hell because it reminded researchers of a giant clawed chicken with a neck like an ostrich. (See the images above.)

"It definitely looks more like a bird than a dinosaur," said Matthew Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and the lead author of the paper. "But it was big. This guy was 7 to 8 feet tall...

Is there really a link between vaccine and autism, cellphones and cancer, the HIV virus and the CIA? Almost half of Americans believe the answer is yes for at least one of the many medical conspiracy theories that have circulated in recent years. And the attitudes and behavior of those conspiracists toward standard medical advice reflect that mistrust, says a study out this week.

A pair of University of Chicago social scientists set out to determine the extent of "medical conspiracism" among the U.S. public and conducted a nationally representative online survey. They gauged knowledge of and...

A space rock will blot out a star Wednesday night, and with a little luck, you can watch it live, right here.

A 45-mile wide asteroid will pass between the Earth and Regulus -- the 22nd brightest star in the night sky. The shadow of the asteroid will cause the star to blink out for as long as 14 seconds -- a subtle star eclipse.

Unfortunately, the astronomical event known as an occultation will be visible only along a narrow stretch of landhere on Earth, so unless you live in New York or eastern Canada, you won't be able to see it firsthand. (And if the weather is cloudy, even people along...

Welcome to the fold! An entomologist trekking through Amazonian rain forest and sifting through musty museums has discovered 19 new species of praying mantis in Central and South America. The findings, published in the journal ZooKeys, nearly triple the number of known bark mantis species and reveal the diversity of this charismatic insect group.

These insects aren’t your typical praying mantises, said entomologist Gavin Svenson, curator of invertebrate zoology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The archetypal praying mantis is a fresh, new-leaf green with a tubular body and is...

In a brave new world in which we've all had our whole genomes analyzed and know about our genetic predisposition to certain diseases, here's a helpful finding: Don't eat a lot of fried food if you happen to carry several of the genetic variations linked to obesity.

And here's some more good advice: Don't eat a lot of fried food even if you carry few or none of the single nucleotide polymorphisms (or SNPs) that confer a higher risk of obesity.

Why? Well, because people who eat a lot of fried food -- especially away from home, where fried foods tend to be deep-fried -- are highly likely to pack...

For years, chocolate lovers have remained blissfully unaware of the precise reason bittersweet dark chocolate seems to improve cardiovascular health. At least until, now that is.

On Tuesday, researchers at meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in Dallas said they had solved the confection conundrum: Specific chocolate-loving microbes in the gut convert an otherwise indigestible portion of the candy into anti-inflammatory compounds, they said.

Using a series of modified test tubes to simulate humans' gurgling guts, researchers exposed several forms of cocoa powder to digestive juices...

NASA has released the largest high-resolution map of our moon ever made, and you are invited to explore its craters and crevices right on your computer or tablet. 

Images for this massive mosaic were collected over four years by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. What you see in the image above, and in a pannable, zoomable image here, is an area of the moon about the size of Texas and Alaska combined. At the center is the moon's north pole. 

Moving around the moon, you can explore the appropriately named Wrinkle Ridge, which marks the boundary between Mare Frigoris and the lunar highlands;...

In the video above, you can watch as a physicist learns that his theory of how the universe began was right after all — 30 years after he first proposed it. 

His reaction moves from disbelief, to joy, to gratefulness, and I promise it will make you smile.

The video comes to us courtesy of Stanford University's publicity department, which had the foresight to follow assistant professor of physics Chao-Lin Kuo as he delivered the good news to another physics professor, Andrei Linde, who first proposed his theory of "new inflation" in the early 1980s.

Kuo is part of a team of researchers...

In what they are calling the most extreme case of frozen plant regeneration ever documented, scientists are claiming to have regrown shoots of Antarctic moss that were trapped beneath layers of ice and frost for more than 1,500 years.

In a paper published Monday in the journal Current Biology, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and the University of Reading, in England, said the regrowth occurred in a core sample taken from a gigantic bank of moss on remote Signy Island.

"These mosses were basically in a very long-term deep freeze," co-author and terrestrial ecologist Peter Convey...

At the tender age of 2 months old, many American babies appear to be taking their first steps on the road to obesity, helped along by parents who may be preoccupied, pushy or uninformed about the care and feeding of babies for optimal health, a new study says.

The latest research found that in a population of predominantly low-income mothers and infants, 2-month-old babies routinely spent long hours either in front of a television or being fed or cared for by a parent watching TV, were frequently put to bed or left to feed themselves with a propped bottle, and rarely got the recommended amount...

Researchers at MIT are giving plants super powers by placing tiny carbon nanotubes deep within their cells.

Some of the altered plants increased their photosynthetic activity by 30% compared with regular old plants. Others were able to detect tiny traces of pollutants in the air.

And that's just the beginning.

Medicines and machines, inspired by nature

"The idea is to impart plants with functions that are non-native to them," said Michael Strano, professor of chemical engineering at MIT.

Strano's lab has been working at the nexus of plant biology and nanotechnology -- an area called plant...

The Rocky Mountain wildflower season has lengthened by over a month since the 1970s, according to a study published Monday that found climate change is altering the flowering patterns of more species than previously thought.

Flowers used to bloom from mid-May to early September, but the season now lasts 35 days longer, from April to mid-September, according to researchers who collected 39 years of data at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory near Crested Butte, Colo.

Earlier spring snowmelt and other climate shifts have changed the timing of blooms for more than two-thirds of 60 species of...

A magnitude 4.4 earthquake struck the Los Angeles area Monday morning – but where exactly did it hit?

The U.S. Geological Survey says the quake was centered about 5.6 miles north-northwest of Westwood. The online report from the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program also notes that the epicenter was 6 miles northwest of Beverly Hills, 7 miles west of Universal City, 7 miles north of Santa Monica and (just for good measure) 349 miles south-southeast of Sacramento.

Initial media accounts of the quake described it as being “near Westwood,”and TV coverage included a map of the...

They say the world is getting smaller -- and in Mercury's case it's literally true. Though it's already the tiniest planet in the solar system, scientists say Mercury is still shrinking -- and signs of that contraction can be clearly seen in wrinkle-like distortions of the planet’s searing surface.

The findings, published in Nature Geoscience, solve a decades-old mystery about the evolution of the little planet’s interior and provide scientists a window into the long-term changes that affect other worlds that don’t have Earth-like plate tectonics.

“Determining the...

The largest lunar impact ever caught on camera took place last Sept. 11, when a small asteroid 2 to 4.5 feet in length slammed into our moon's pockmarked surface at 37,900 mph.

The resulting explosion caused a flash of light that briefly burned as bright as the north star, Polaris, and lingered for 8.5 seconds. It also left a new crater on the moon that scientists estimate to be about 130 feet in diameter. 

On Sunday, at 6 p.m. PDT, the website Slooh will point its telescopes at a part of the moon known as Mare Nubium where the recent impact occurred, and you are invited to watch the show...

A California appeals court has sided with landowners fighting the state over test drilling for a proposed water tunnel system in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

In a 2-1 decision, an appeals panel ruled Thursday that the state needed to go through the eminent domain process to gain access to private property on which it wanted to take soil samples and conduct environmental surveys.

The testing is necessary for the design and construction of two 30-mile tunnels that the state proposes to build as part of a delta replumbing project. To obtain soil samples, workers drill 200-feet-deep holes, a...

How's this for "death by cute?" Paleontologists have dug up a fearsome new dinosaur in a surprising place: Nanuqsaurus, a pygmy tyrannosaur that lived far away from its larger sharped-toothed cousins — in what is now Alaska.

The newly named Nanuqsaurus hoglundi fossil, described in PLoS ONE, reveals that dinosaurs lived in the Arctic 70 million years ago, during a much warmer period in Earth's history.

“The discovery of Nanuqsaurus hoglundiprovides new insights into tyrannosaurid adaptability and evolution in an ancient greenhouse Arctic,” wrote study authors Anthony...

Today is Pi Day. Math nerds and geometry aficionados will be celebrating the mathematical constant that describes the relationship between the circumference of a circle and its diameter.

For those who need a refresher: Take a circle that is 1 inch across. Then measure the length of the circle itself. When you’ve gone all the way around, you’ll have covered a distance of slightly more than 3.14 inches. That’s pi. (And that’s why Pi Day is observed on March 14.)

For Pi Day, how to celebrate the joys of 3.14159 ...

Pi (represented by the Greek letter Π) has many uses....

New research has found that a protein indicating the breakdown of white matter in the brain can be detected following a hard blow to the head, raising hopes that a blood test could soon detect a concussion, predict how long symptoms will linger, and guide decisions about an athlete's return to play.

In their bid to find a blood "biomarker" for concussion, researchers went to a sport with plenty of blood and plenty of concussions: hockey. For the first half of the 2012-13 hockey season, they gathered blood samples and tracked blows to the head among the 288 professional hockey players of the...

The Japanese research institution at the center of a growing controversy over a new type of stem cells said Friday that its investigation of four scientists has confirmed two instances of "inappropriate" behavior but that neither case was severe enough to be considered intentional misconduct or outright fabrication of data.

An investigative committee at RIKEN, which is funded primarily by the Japanese government, has been looking into charges that two high-profile paperspublished in January in the journal Nature included plagiarized material, duplicate photos and doctored figures. The papers...

The first confirmed case of a woman contracting HIV from another woman during sex was reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week.

Although there have been reports of women transmitting the human immunodeficiency virus to other women via sexual activity in the past, they have been difficult to prove. For nearly all the cases, other risk factors were present -- including recent sexual contact with a man, intravenous drug use, tattooing, piercing or other potentially risky behaviors.

But this time, the case seems pretty iron-clad. 

As outlined in a paper published by the...

It was hailed as a remarkable scientific breakthrough, one that could potentially revolutionize medicine by enabling the speedy production of highly versatile stem cells.

Now, barely two months after scientists published papers in Nature claiming to have fundamentally transformed mouse cells by simply exposing them to acid, a study author has raised questions about the papers' validity and sparked a major investigation.

Later Thursday night, Japan's RIKENresearch laboratory will answer questions about its probe into research involving so-called "stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency,...

Think of a robot. Chances are you imagined one with legs like C-3PO of "Star Wars" fame or something with wheels like NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity. Neither of these rigid body types are particularly flexible and certainly can’t move through water well. But what about a robot with a tail? Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have designed a soft robot based on a fish, which can bend its body and quickly flee the way that real fish do to escape predators.

Typical robots are rigid with exposed mechanisms and unnatural movement, but the fish described in the first...

Lake Tahoe’s famously blue waters are maintaining their overall clarity, despite dropping 5 feet last year.

The findings, released by the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center and the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, reported the average annual clarity level at 70.1 feet in 2013, a 5-foot decrease from the previous year but still above recent averages.

The annual State of the Lake report was released Thursday.

Clarity level is arrived at by taking an average from 25 readings taken at different times of the year. The deepest clear depth reading in 2013 was 90 feet, and the lowest...

When the Food

Scientists have discovered the biggest underbite ever found in a mammal. It belongs to an extinct porpoise that lived on the California coast 5 million years ago.

That crazy long underbite you see in the images above was not an anomaly. Scientists have found 15 specimens of this porpoise, known as Semirostrum ceruttii, all with a similarly major underbite, all from California. The fossils date from 1.5 million to 5.3 million years ago. 

The protuberance is an extension of the porpoise's jaw called a symphysis that is analogous to the human chin. It had extensive nerve canals that connected it...

Alcohol is responsible for about 88,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, according to a new government report on the toll of excessive drinking.

The study, published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, comes as police investigate an alleged drunk driver who struck and killed two people early Thursday morning at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. Another 23 people were injured after the driver went the wrong way on a one-way street in an apparent attempt to evade an officer who had pulled him over. Austin police Chief Art Acevedo said officials planned to...

If you're a student of fat - and who isn't these days? - you know that the FTO gene is the gene thought to be most responsible for some people's inherited propensity to become obese. Well, forget that.

A multinational group of geneticists has discovered that, more likely, the real obesity gene is named IRX3, and it is very far from the FTO gene - or would be, if DNA were to be stretched out in linear fashion instead of coiled up like a skein of yarn.

In a letter posted Wednesday to the website of the journal Nature, University of Chicago geneticists Scott Smemo and Marcelo A. Nobrega, along...

A pilot study failed to show something many people believe – that drinking raw milk reduces the symptoms of lactose intolerance or malabsorption.

The condition is common worldwide, and can lead to bloating, abdominal pain and diarrhea. But the specific prevalence of lactose intolerance is not known, the researchers from Stanford University said.

Current coping strategies include not drinking milk, drinking lactose-free dairy products, taking lactase enzyme tablets and other behaviors, but none of those eliminate the symptoms, the researchers wrote.

“Recently, unpasteurized raw milk...

NASA’s elderly Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flipped into “safe mode” on Sunday after an unexpected computing glitch caused the spacecraft to switch from its main computer to its backup.

The 8-year-old satellite, which left Earth in August 2005 and entered Martian orbit on March 10, 2006, has lived well beyond its primary two-year science phase, so perhaps the occasional "brain fart" is understandable. Tasked with searching for signs that water flowed on Mars for a long period of time, it’s been sending Earth detailed information aboutseasonal and longer-term changes on...

Ever feel the rainy-day blues on a bright and sunny afternoon? If so, your Facebook account may be to blame, according to new research.

In a paper published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists argued that the hugely popular social networking site exerts an emotional "spillover" effect that may carry significant consequences for an increasingly interconnected world.

By analyzing more than a billion Facebook status updates, authors concluded that emotionally positive posts gave rise to more positive posts by friends, while negative posts spawned more negative posts.

"It was actually a...

A project that could point the way to a new class of drugs to treat influenza won the top prize Tuesday night at the Intel Science Talent Search, netting 17-year-old Eric S. Chen a cool $100,000.

Chen, a senior at Canyon Crest Academy in San Diego, combined chemistry, biology and computer modeling to find compounds capable of blocking an enzyme called endonuclease, which the flu virus needs to spread.

Despite taking home the grand prize at the 2013 Google Science Fair and the top individual honor at the 2013 Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, Chen said he didn’t expect...

This spring TV viewers were treated to the drama of "Cosmos: A Spacetime Voyage." This winter they'll get the more whimsical look at the world of science.

Late night talk show host Craig Ferguson announced he will executive produce an hourlong series based on the popular Facebook page "I ... Love Science" (IFLS), whose title, like the series', uses an expletive. The series will air on the Science Channel at the end of this year.

"If you know anything about me, you know I love science," Ferguson said in a statement. "And this show is going to explore the randomness of science. Think of it as a...

More than two decades since the first U.S. invasion of Iraq, medical authorities can’t agree on a definition of Gulf War illness, the mysterious array of ailments afflicting many veterans of the conflict.

In the latest attempt to settle the debate, the Department of Veterans Affairs commissioned the prestigious Institute of Medicine to develop a definition. But in a report released Wednesday, its experts said the symptoms — including joint pain, fatigue, headaches, rashes, digestive problems and cognitive impairment — vary so widely that there was no way to reach a scientific...

A number of scientists have been grumbling for weeks about a pair of breakthrough stem cell studies that seemed too good to be true. Now one of the senior researchers who worked on the papers agrees that they may be right.

The studies, which were published in January by the journal Nature, described a surprisingly simple method of transforming mature cells into pluripotent stem cells capable of regenerating any type of tissue in the body. The key was to stress them out by soaking them in an acid bath for 30 minutes, prompting genetic changes that made the cells more flexible. The researchers...

Obesity is probably a factor in some of the almost 22,000 new diagnoses of ovarian cancer that will be handed out this year to American women, a new study says. The finding adds ovarian cancer, the deadliest of the gynecological malignancies, to a growing list of diseases linked to carrying far too much weight.

Research has found obesity to contribute to a person's risk for a wide range of illnesses, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancers of the breast, colon, pancreas and esophagus.

In the case of ovarian cancer, which affects 8 in 100,000 women in the United States,...

If an ice age is coming and you are a lichen in Antarctica, you better hope you live near a volcano.

A new study suggests organisms native to the South Pole survived ice ages by huddling in pockets of warmth created by the heat of underground volcanoes.

"These slightly warmer areas would have kept some parts of the continent ice free and let organisms survive on that land," said Peter Convey of the British Antarctic Survey. "Then, when the ice receded, the plants and animals spread out from that refuge to occupy other places."

(To see what these hot spots look like today, click on the photo...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the marketing of an electronic medical device intended to treat migraine headaches.

In an announcement released Tuesday, officials said the transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, or TENS, device was the first ever to receive such approval.

The device, which will be marketed under the name Cefaly, is manufactured by Cefaly Technology of Belgium.

"Cefaly provides an alternative to medication for migraine prevention," read a prepared statement from Christy Foreman, director of the Office of Device Evaluation at the FDA's Center for Devices...

A daily glucosamine drink supplement failed to prevent deterioration of knee cartilage, reduce bone bruises or ease knee pain, according to a recent short-term study of the popular, if controversial, dietary product. 

In a paper published Tuesday in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatology, authors studied the effects of glucosamine hydrochloride on a group of 201 adults for six months.

"Our study found no evidence that drinking glucosamine supplement reduced knee cartilage damage, relieved pain or improved function in individuals with chronic knee pain," said the study's lead author, Dr. C. Kent...

In the rings of ancient and gnarled trees, a team of scientists has found evidence of a period of consistent warmth and wetness in Mongolia between the years 1211 and 1225 -- the exact time that Genghis Khan first rose to power. 

Coincidence? They think not.

This unusual stretch of mild temperatures and unprecedented rain in an area traditionally known for its cold and arid climate would have increased the productivity of grasslands in the Mongolian steppe, the researchers say. The abundant grass would in turn increase the number of grazing animals that could live off it.

Members of Khan's...

Victims of bullying were more than twice as likely as other kids to contemplate suicide and about 2.5 times as likely to try to kill themselves, according to a new study that quantifies the emotional effects of being teased, harassed, beaten up or otherwise harmed by one’s peers.

Children and teens who were taunted by cyberbullies were especially vulnerable -- they were about three times as likely than other kids to have suicidal thoughts, the study found.

The findings, published online Monday by the journal JAMA Pediatrics, puts the lie to the old adage about sticks and stones. Cases of...

For the first time, a test that detects 10 types of lipids, or fats, circulating in a person's blood has been shown to predict accurately whether he or she will develop the memory loss and mental decline of Alzheimer's disease over the next two to three years. A screening test based on the findings could be available in as little as two years, said the researchers who identified the blood biomarkers.

The effort to identify predictors of Alzheimer's disease that are reliable, easy and inexpensive to detect was described Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine. Blood biomarkers for Alzheimer's...

Elephants may be known for their memory, but it turns out they’re incredible listeners, too. African elephants who hear human voices can tell people of different sexes, ages and even ethnic groups apart, according to a new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Such keen ears are necessary when trying to survive in territory marked by human-elephant conflict.

African elephants who live in Amboseli National Park in Kenya share land with  the Maasai people, who raise and herd cattle. The two groups sporadically come into conflict over such resources as...

Many people agree that focusing on a smartphone or tablet is a bad idea when you're supposed to be driving a car, but what about when you're parenting a child?

As mobile devices become increasingly absorbing and pervasive, social commentators and researchers worry what effects they're having on interactions between children and distracted caregivers.

In a paper published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, Boston researchers described what they called the first-ever investigation into the topic.

They did so by secretly watching subjects at fast-food restaurants and recording their observations...

In a young, nearby solar system, scientists have discovered giant clouds of poison gas -- the smoking gun from a violent encounter, astronomers say. Based on massive amounts of carbon monoxide gas around the star Beta Pictoris, either two Mars-sized planets slammed into each other with catastrophic results, or hordes of comets are crashing into one another at an astounding rate.

The findings, published by the journal Science, could help provide an up-close look at how stars and their planetary systems form and evolve.

Beta Pictoris lies about 63 light years away and is only about 20 million...

Scientists have made a surprising discovery in the waters off the coast of Iraq: a coral reef made up of more than half a dozen species of the marine animals.

A team of divers from the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology in Germany and the Marine Science Center at the University of Basrah in Iraq captured video footageof the murky waters where the Shatt al-Arab river flows into the northwestern portion of the Persian Gulf. (You can watch the video above.) The river carries sediment -- and frequently oil -- into that portion of the gulf, which is often churned up by strong winds and...

Latinos and African Americans make up a disproportionately high percentage of the population of California ZIP Codes most burdened by pollution, according to a report released Friday by state environmental officials.

Latinos account for nearly two-thirds of residents in the top 10% most polluted ZIP Codes despite making up only 38% of the state’s population, the analysis by the California Environmental Protection Agency shows.

Nearly 10% of residents of the most polluted ZIP Codes are black, though they make up only 6% of the population statewide, according to the report. Whites, in...

What happens to our DNA, RNA and proteins if we spend a long time in space? A pair of 50-year-old twins will help NASA find out.

Identical twins Mark and Scott Kelly have signed up to be part of the first-ever twin study that takes place, at least partially, in space.

In March 2015, veteran astronaut Scott Kelly will begin a one-year stint living aboard the International Space Station. It will be the longest amount of consecutive time that any American astronaut has spent in space. 

ISS: International Space Station crews and images from space

His brother Mark Kelly, who is married to former...

Everyone dislikes some kind of music, but are there people out there who don’t respond to musical pathos?

Apparently, yes, and they weren’t lying when they said so, according to a study published online Thursday in Current Biology.

A team of researchers from Spain and Canada was trying to develop an accurate questionnaire to gauge people’s sense of reward from music when they found that roughly 5% of their study subjects reported getting no pleasure at all from music.

So they followed up by testing 30 subjects, grouped by their relative affinity for music. The bottom group,...

New research has found that women are on average no more likely to have multiple sexual partners in a single month after they are provided no-cost access to birth control methods than they were before. And while women reported a slight uptick in their reported monthly sexual encounters a year after getting free contraceptives, the new study says the resulting frequency of sexual activity fell within expected boundaries for women of childbearing age.

In a prospective cohort study called the Contraceptive Choice Project, 9,256 women and teenage girls in and around St. Louis were provided...

The odds are increasing that El Niño, the powerful climate phenomenon that alters precipitation patterns across the globe, will develop in the Pacific Ocean this year, U.S. government forecasters say.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center activated its alert system on Thursday to issue an El Niño watch.

The alert means that conditions in the eastern tropical Pacific are favorable enough that El Niño has a more than a 50% chance of forming by the summer or fall.

Though it’s too early to predict with much confidence, if El Niño re-emerges it...

Peering deep into the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, scientists have spotted the first disintegrating space rock ever observed.

The rock is crumbing slowly -- its disparate pieces gliding gently away from each other at the sluggish rate of one mile an hour, slower than human walking speed.

The strange space rock first caught scientists' attention in September when the Catalina and Pan STARRS sky survey telescopes detected what looked like an unusually fuzzy object on the far side of the asteroid belt.

PHOTOS: Amazing images from space

A closer inspection with the higher resolution W....

The ocean doesn’t just moderate temperatures and influence weather in some of the world’s biggest cities; it also has the power to cleanse the air, new research suggests.

At night, the sea surface can absorb and remove up to 15% of smog-forming nitrogen oxides that build up in polluted air in coastal cities like Los Angeles, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers at UC San Diego came to that conclusion after deploying scientific instruments at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography pier last year to measure the...

James Gurney, the author and illustrator of the "Dinotopia" book series, has had a dinosaur named after him. 

And it happens to be a particularly cool dinosaur, too. Torvosaurus gurneyi is the largest predatory land dinosaur ever discovered in Europe, according to a new study in the journal PLOS One. 

T. gurneyi was 32 feet long, a little shorter than the average school bus. It was a therapod that stood on a two legs, and it had razor-sharp teeth up to 4 inches long. Its skull was nearly 4 feet long.

It lived 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic period, and was probably at the top of the...

In a psychology lab at Oregon State University, 37 girls ages 4 to 7 have finally demonstrated what feminists have long warned: that playing with Barbie dolls drives home cultural stereotypes about a woman's place and suppresses a little girl's career ambitions. But here's an unexpected, though preliminary, finding: Playing with Mrs. Potato Head, by contrast, appears to have the effect of attending a "Lean In" circle on little girls. After spending just five minutes with Jane Potato-Head, girls believed they could grow up to do pretty much anything a boy could do.

This small but telling experi...

A baby infected with HIV appears to be free of the virus after doctors at a Long Beach hospital initiated aggressive drug treatment just four hours after birth.

A pediatrician at Miller Children's Hospital Long Beach and her colleagues disclosed the case Wednesday at a Boston AIDS conference.

The newborn girl was initially confirmed to have HIV through blood and spinal fluid tests. However, after six days of treatment with antiretroviral drugs, the virus could no longer be detected, doctors said.

The girl, who was born in April and is being referred to as the "Los Angeles baby," remains on...

Warning: Don’t try and stick this clam in your chowder. Scientists have built a robotic clam that isn't edible but could be incredibly useful, because it easily outperforms other commercial digging devices. This RoboClam, described at the American Physical Society meeting in Denver, could prove invaluable as low-energy anchors or as an environmentally safe way to lay down more intercontinental, undersea fiber-optic cables.

The Atlantic razor clam (Ensis directus) is a small, weak creature, about 4 to 8 inches in length. It has a weak squishy body that pokes, tongue-like, out of a long,...

The World Health Organization is challenging you to eat no more than six teaspoons of sugar per day.

In a new guideline on sugar consumption, the United Nations’ health agency reiterates its 2002 recommendation that no more than 10% of daily calories come in the form of sugar. But this time around, the WHO adds that people would get additional benefits if they can keep their sugar consumption below 5% of daily calories.

That’s likely to be a tall order. For an adult with a normal body mass index, 5% of daily calories works out to about 25 grams of sugar, or six teaspoons, the WHO...

A long-term study of men diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer in the late 1980s and 1990s concludes that those who were treated with surgery were much less likely to die of the disease -- or of anything else --than those whose prostates were left in place and received close monitoring from their doctors.

The study, which appears in Thursday’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, also finds that the more time that passed since their diagnosis, the greater the benefits of early surgery became.

The 695 men in the Scandinavian Prostate Cancer Group Study Number 4all hailed...

Beneath a sea of fake stars in a theater in Griffith Park, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ann Druyan and Seth MacFarlane premiered the first episode of their new series "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" on Tuesday night.

The show is billed as a continuation of Carl Sagan's beloved mini-series "Cosmos: A Personal Journey." That award-winning show first aired 34 years ago, and has since been seen 750 million times. Pretty amazing for a show about science. 

This time around it is Tyson, astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, who guides viewers on a journey through the Cosmos--...

A few hundred million years ago, fish fins morphed into the arms and legs of terrestrial animals, according to evolutionary theory. So, you’d think science would know just about everything about them by now.

It turns out that some fins are more important than others. The tiny adipose fin, a fatty nub between the dorsal fin and tail of some 6,000 species of fish, has been the ugly stepchild of anatomy. Most scientists shrugged and dismissed it as a withered vestige of a second dorsal fin present in a common ancestor, but jettisoned by its progeny as they radiated into new species.

But a...

Pity the poor male common Mormon swallowtail butterfly. His potential female consorts bear four different color patterns, only one of which looks familiar. The rest look suspiciously like other species, and toxic ones at that.

That deception is welcome news for 75% of the Papilio polytes ladies, which can avoid predators that have learned not to dine on the real toxic butterfly. They're a classic example of "parasitic" mimicry, a strictly one-sided affair that benefits only the imitator, but leaves the male and the masculine-colored female vulnerable.

Biologists have studied mimicry cases...

For the first time in more than four decades, the drug lysergic acid diethylamide -- better known as LSD -- has been the experimental adjunct to psychotherapy in a controlled clinical trial approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And a newly published study on that trial reports that the medication's anti-anxiety effects on patients facing life-threatening illnesses were sizable, sustained -- and free of worrisome side effects.

In short, everything was groovy.

In a pilot study conducted in Switzerland, 12 patients suffering deep anxiety due to serious illnesses participated in...

Apparently casinos are good for losing more than just cash.

A study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. found that adding slot machines to California casinos was linked to a modest reduction in obesity rates for Native American children.

Specifically, researchers found that for every one-armed bandit added per child, there was a corresponding 0.19% reduction in obesity risk.

Study authors based their conclusions on an examination of 117 California school districts that encompass tribal lands.

In California, casinos are permitted only on Native American lands, and...

NASA’s budget for the 2015 fiscal year wouldn’t budge much from last year under the White House’s proposal for nearly $17.5 billion, as officials reaffirmed the commitment to extending the life of the International Space Station, funding potential missions to Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa and sending a manned mission to nab an asteroid and bring it back to Earth orbit.

The proposed $17.46-billion budget for 2015 is roughly $200 million less than the 2014 fiscal year request, and the planetary science division would receive about $1.28 billion -- not quite up to last...

Black bears in Yosemite National Park aren’t snacking as much on human food as they did decades ago, according to new research that traces changes in the diet of Yosemite bears over the last century.

Researchers analyzed samples of bear bones from museums and bear hair collected from the field to determine the ratio of human-to-wild-food that Yosemite bears consumed as far back as 1915.

Not surprisingly, they found that the proportion of human food rose significantly after the park started feeding bears in 1923 to keep the animals away from developed areas. Lighted feeding platforms were...

Anyone want to talk about the Cosmos?

On Tuesday evening, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and the producers of "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" will answer your questions during a live question and answer session to be broadcast from the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, and you can watch it live, right here.

The live broadcast begins at 6 p.m. PST.

"Cosmos: A SpacetimeOdyssey" premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday on Fox and the National Geographic Channel. It it is an update of Carl Sagan's seminal 1980 PBS series "Cosmos: A Personal Journey."

Sagan's "Cosmos" was an attempt to explain as much as we know...

Consuming high levels of protein — particularly animal protein — is a bad strategy if you’re at midlife and aiming to live into old age, new research finds. But a study out Tuesday reveals that in older age, fortifying one’s diet with more protein-rich foods appears to be a formula for extending life.

An articlepublished in the journal Cell Metabolism says that, over an 18-year study period, middle-aged Americans who had the highest consumption of protein were more than four times as likely to die of cancer or diabetes, and twice as likely to die of any cause, than...

American women – especially white women – are increasingly choosing to have their babies at home instead of in a hospital, new government data show.

One out of every 49 babies born to non-Latino white mothers in 2012 came into the world outside of a hospital, according to a report published Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About two-thirds of those births occurred at home.

Mothers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds gave birth to 35,184 babies at home in 2012. That amounted to 0.89% of all births that year. Another 15,577 babies were born at birthing...

Wait three days after it rains before going into the ocean. It’s a warning that public health officials issued to beachgoers this week, as they do after any significant storm in California.

But a study released Monday is raising questions about whether that three-day waiting period is enough to protect people who swim, surf and play in the ocean from pathogens in storm runoff that can make them ill.

"To err on the side of caution, stay out of the water for five days after rainfall," said Amanda Griesbach, a water quality scientist at Heal the Bay, an environmental group that provided...

Take a deep breath, meditation enthusiasts: A new study finds that research on mindfulness meditation has yielded moderate evidence that the practice can reduce anxiety, depressive symptoms and pain, but little to no evidence that it can reduce substance abuse or improve mood, sleep or weight control. And no evidence was found that meditation programs were better than drugs, exercise or other behavioral therapies at addressing issues of mental health. 

The latest word on meditation's effects comes from a meta-analysis--essentially a study of existing clinical trials that sifts, consolidates...

The number of Americans who are infected with hepatitis C is falling, but that’s probably because more people who have been sickened by the virus are dying as a result, government researchers reported Monday.

After analyzing data from thousands of people who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that about 1% of the population over age 5 have hepatitis C. If so, that would translate to 2.68 million people with the virus, known as HCV.

In addition, the researchers estimated that 900,...

In the last 50 years, what’s on dinner plates has grown more similar the world over – with major consequences for human nutrition and global food security, researchers said Monday.

“Diversity enhances the health and function of complex biological systems,” the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But, they said, the world of food has become homogeneous, to the point of suggesting a global standard food supply.

In the last half a century, “national per capita food supplies expanded in total quantities of food calories, protein,...

Americans use twice the amount of water they think they do, and appear to be particularly oblivious about how much H2O they flush down the toilet on a daily basis, according to new research.

In a paper published online Monday in the journal PNAS, a researcher concluded that Americans underestimated their water use by a factor of 2, and were only slightly aware of how much water goes into growing the food they eat.

"In general, people tend to underestimate water by a very large magnitude," said study author Shahzeen Attari, an assistant professor in the Department of Public and Environmental...

A 30,000-year-old giant virus has been revived from the frozen Siberian tundra, sparking concern that increased mining and oil drilling in rapidly warming northern latitudes could disturb dormant microbial life that could one day prove harmful to man.

The latest find, described online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,appears to belong to a new family of mega-viruses that infect only amoeba. But its revival in a laboratory stands as “a proof of principle that we could eventually resurrect active infectious viruses from different periods,” said the...

Scientists have strapped cameras onto free-swimming sharks, capturing a shark’s-eye view of their underwater world.

The footage from 14 tiger sharks, six Galapagos sharks, five sandbar sharks, five bluntnose sixgill sharks and a prickly shark is the first to be taken of sharks, by sharks in their natural environment.

One clip from a camera attached to a male sandbar shark show the pursuit of a female; another shows its wearer's point of view as it meets up with dozens of other sharks in a mixed group — including sandbars, oceanic blacktips and scalloped hammerheads — and...

Discouraging news for diabetics who are keen to ward off memory problems and keep their brains in peak condition: New research has found that using medication to aggressively drive down blood pressure or improve lipid levels does not do more than standard therapy to stem the decline in cognition that's common among such patients. In fact, aggressively lowering systolic blood pressure may accelerate brain shrinkage, which is a hallmark of dementia, the new study found.

The findings, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, emerge from a large and long-running clinical trial aimed at figuring...

Drought or no drought, utilities across California are campaigning to get homeowners to reduce outdoor water use, which often constitutes at least half of a household’s water consumption.

One of the largest urban retail water agencies in the state is pursuing a new strategy in that effort:  “Behavioral water efficiency.”

The East Bay Municipal Utility District, which serves 1.3 million customers in the east San Francisco Bay Area, is expanding a pilot program that provides individual residential customers with water report cards, showing how their use compares with similar-...

Listen up loners: A new study says having friends can make you smarter, at least if you're a baby cow. 

Researchers from the University of British Columbia found that young calves that live alone performed worse on tests of cognitive skill than calves that live with a buddy.

On most dairy farms, calves are removed from their mothers soon after they are born and put in a pen or a hutch where they live alone for eight to 10 weeks while they wean. The practice developed to keep disease from spreading among susceptible baby cows.

But a few years ago, researchers at UBC's Animal Welfare Program...

Here are some findings that could scare you to death: In a study published this week, Finnish and Estonian researchers report that they have identified specific levels of four chemicals circulating in the blood that offer a reliable signal that death is near. The four harbingers of death can be readily detected in a blood sample, and are even predictive when seen in apparently healthy people, their new study shows.

It's not just a life insurance saleman's dream. The study,released this week in the journal PLOS Medicine, suggests that several potentially deadly conditions -- cancer,...

Scientists have discovered the DNA of millions of tiny organisms entombed in the ancient dental plaque of four medieval skeletons. 

The findings, published in the journal Nature Genetics, have implications for research into what our ancestors ate, how they interacted, and what diseases they fought, the authors write.

Happy International Polar Bear Day!

The polar bear conservation group Polar Bears International, has set aside Feb. 27 as a special day to celebrate those furry white giants of the North, and to remind the public that it is not too late to help them.

The struggle for polar bears is that the Arctic sea ice where they live and hunt is shrinking -- and as a result, so are their numbers.

A 2007 study from the U.S. Geological Survey found that if the current rate of Arctic-sea-ice loss continues, two-thirds of the world's polar bear population could disappear by the middle of the century.

But Steven...

A child born to a father 45 or older is three and a half times more likely to be diagnosed with autism, more than 13 times more likely to have attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and almost 25 times more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder than a child born to a man in his early twenties, says a study out this week.

Suicide attempts and substance use problems were also found to be more than twice as common in children born to older fathers than those with younger dads, and rates of academic failure -- staying back a grade -- and low educational attainment were higher in...

Aiming to give Americans the tools to make healthier dietary choices, the Food and Drug Administration has unveiled a revamped version of one of the nation's most recognized graphics -- the "Nutrition Facts" box that appears on the back or side of packaged foods and beverages.

The proposed new information box increases the visibility of the "serving size," allowing consumers to see without mental gymnastics the size of a normal portion, as well as the nutrients it contains.

It advertises the calorie content of a serving in larger typeface than any other information on the label, shouting a...

Don't call it a comeback just yet. Astronomers mourned the Kepler Space Telescope after it was crippled last year. But NASA’s planet hunter may be getting a second chance at life — with an ingenious, just-so-crazy-it-might-work plan that would use the sun’s rays to steer the spacecraft.

The data already collected by Kepler are still turning up a treasure trove of hundreds of planets, as Wednesday's announcement showed. But if it passes NASA approval, the potential new mission, called K2, could mean a whole different kind of search to find Earth-size exoplanets, along with...