Culture

During the first centuries after having been written down, the Bible’s Ten Commandments were not nearly as set in stone (pardon the pun) as has been assumed, according to new claims.

Big Business may have failed to stop Trump from getting the nomination, but CEOs could still be insuring that Clinton wins, according to a new analysis.

Females outnumber men in biology at the undergraduate and Ph.D. levels and have this entire century. Where do they still lag? Faculty positions.

The issue is clearly not sexism, academia prides itself on being more liberal and inclusive than private sector science, it is the tenure system. Tenured scientists are living longer, continuing to do fine work, and therefore not making way for younger female scientists who have an advantage in hiring now.

Most media attention is awarded to cancer’s success stories – new treatment breakthroughs are celebrated as researchers (and journalists) search for an exciting new “cure” for cancer.

But what happens after these innovations hit the news? And who is going to buy them?

The newest drugs are frequently the most costly, and healthcare systems are already struggling. Where is the money going? And is there evidence that the money spent on innovation actually benefits cancer patients?

Proximity is an important influence in consumer decisions on everyday purchases, according to a new survey.

In the survey, 93.2 percent of respondents said they typically travel less than 20 minutes to buy groceries, clothing, gas, and other routine transactions, while 87 percent said they won’t travel beyond 15 minutes for such purchases. For purchases that consumers make at least once per week, the distance they’re willing to travel shrinks even further to ten minutes.

The war on fat is back, thanks to an aggressive campaign by food pundits related to sugar, GMOs and corporations.

For a while, it looked like all thin people were going to be placed into mandatory body image counseling, the Kardashians had made plump the new natural, but doctors have overruled activists like Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle and their beliefs about nutrition and affirmed that it's calories that matter, not the scary story of the week.

Paracetamol has been around for over 50 years. It’s safe and many guidelines recommend it as the go-to treatment. At least, that’s the conventional view of the drug. It’s a view so ingrained that it’s rarely questioned. The trouble is that the conventional view is probably wrong.

If corporate money controls our politics, as Bernie Sanders and others have claimed, then how did the Republican Party – the reputed party of business – manage to nominate a candidate whom almost no one in Big Business supports? And why have so many been so silent about it?

England has a failing national drug policy, shown in a steep rise in drug related deaths since 2012, warn public health experts in The BMJ this week. Oddly, they claim fiscal responsibility and say giving addicts more free housing would solve the problem, which will baffle economists.

By some estimates, about 2 billion tons of food, about 50 percent of all the food produced on the planet, is wasted before it ever reaches a human stomach.

That's bad, but science, like apples and potatoes that look more appealing for a longer time, can fix some of that, while better pesticides and scientific optimization can improve yields at the agriculture stage, if environmentalists would stop terrorizing people about food.

Chocolate or apple? Most people are in two minds when buying food: one motivation is to purchase whatever tastes best – so something that is generally sweet or fatty. At the same time, we know attention should be paid on health factors and, for instance, making sure we don’t consume too many calories. A new survey finds that if the packaging information also features food traffic light colors, fewer products are chosen purely based on taste and more based on health aspects compared with nutritional information purely in percentages and grams.

The US has one of the highest rates of obesity in the world, with soda consumption identified as one of the factors. On average, Americans consumed 46 gallons of soda in 2009, giving the US one of the highest rates of per capita soda consumption of any country. A recent report estimated that soda consumption caused one-fifth of weight gain in the US between 1977 and 2007.

Controversy over prostate cancer screening guidelines that discourage use of PSA tests did not significantly reduce use of the test, a five-year review of more than 275,000 visits at UT Southwestern Medical Center showed.

German scholars headed by professor Brakemeier have introduced a new form of psychotherapeutic treatment for substance abuse with depression: The Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy.

51 members of the U.S. House of Representatives have signed a letter to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) urging the federal agency to halt an emergency push to ban the coffee-related herb kratom by as early as tomorrow. A related letter by the 51 U.S. House Members also has been sent to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).