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It wouldn’t have mattered if Bill Clinton inhaled, as far as his lungs are concerned. Smoking up to a joint per day doesn’t seem to decrease lung function, according to a study published in Jan. 11 edition of Journal of the American Medical Association. In fact, occasional marijuana use was associated with slight increases in lung airflow rates and increases in lung volume, the study found. Far from a license to light up, the study eases the worry among some health professionals that daily use of marijuana for medical reasons could have negative, long-term implications on pulmonary health....

My vote for the most important scientific revolution of all time would trace back 10,000 years ago to the Middle East, when people first noticed that new plants arise from seeds falling to the ground from other plants—a realization that led to the birth of agriculture. Before that observation, the human race had based its diet on fruits, nuts, tubers and occasional meats. People had to move to where their food happened to be, putting them at the mercy of events and making long-term settlements impossible....

By Gene Emery Reuters Health - Going into the blocked artery of someone who is having a stroke to remove the clot is more likely to produce a good recovery than treatment with just clot-busting drugs, according to a study of 500 patients in the Netherlands. “Catching the clot and fishing it out of the blocked artery to reopen it makes a big difference in outcome,” Dr. Jeffrey Saver, a director of the University of California Los Angeles Stroke Center, told Reuters Health....

Exact details of the alternative natural and traditional therapies tried by Steve Jobs before he underwent surgery in 2004 and eventually died of pancreatic cancer earlier this month have not been disclosed. (A representative from Apple declined to comment on any aspect of the Apple co-founder’s illness.) He reportedly restricted his diet to just fruits or just fruits and vegetables, tried out something called hydrotherapy and consulted psychics. In any case, a mounting body of scientific and anecdotal reports provides compelling evidence about the potential impact, both positive and negative, of so-called complementary practices on the health and longevity of cancer patients following their diagnosis....

Plastic imbued with clay nanoparticles helps make Miller Brewing Co. beer bottles less likely to break as well as improves how long the brew lasts in storage. Simply H’s Toddler Health nutritional drink mix includes 300-nanometer (300 billionths of a meter) iron particles. And a wide range of cooking and cleaning items now employ nanosize silver particles to kill microbes. Yet, the Washington, D.C.–based environmental group Friends of the Earth (FoE) reports that none of the more than 100 food or food-related products it identified that contain nanoparticles—puny particles between 100 and one nanometers—bears a warning label or has undergone safety testing by government agencies....

Plague conjures images of Gothic horror—rough wooden carts piled high with pestilent bodies—but it is more than a medieval memory. The disease, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, kills several hundred people every year by attacking the lungs, lymph nodes or blood. Less obviously, plague also ravages wildlife around the world. Introduced to the U.S. a century ago, it is creeping into the upper Midwest, wiping out prairie dogs and threatening the black-footed ferret, one of North America’s rarest species....

A new study, the results of which could significantly improve treatment for everything from anxiety to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), shows that people can suppress emotionally wrenching memories at will with practice. The report, published in this week’s issue of Science begins to shed light on the brain activities involved in quashing painful memories. A research team, led by Brendan Depue, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Center for Neuroscience, trained 16 subjects—none of whom were previously diagnosed with any psychiatric problems—to recognize 40 pairs of visual stimuli....

The ecology of the gut microbiome may trigger or contribute to a variety of diseases, including autoimmune disorders and obesity, research suggests. Factors such as early environment, diet and antibiotic exposure have a lot to do with why people differ from one another in the composition of their microbiomes. But specific gene variants are also linked to greater risks of developing many of these diseases. Do your genes act on your microbiome, which in turn promotes disease?...

We are all time travelers. Every day we experience new things as we travel forward through time. As we do, the countless connections between the nerve cells in our brain recalibrate to accommodate these experiences. It’s as if we reassemble ourselves daily, maintaining a mental construct of ourselves in physical time, and the glue that holds together our core identity is memory. Our travels are not limited to physical time. We also experience mental time travel....

A fungus known as Geomyces destructans is indeed responsible for the dusting of white across bat noses and wings that has wiped out entire populations of the flying mammals, new research shows. By purposefully infecting healthy bats with the fungus—and confirming that seemingly healthy “control” bats from the same population did not get sick from a prior but hidden fungal infection—microbiologist David Blehert of the U.S. Geological Survey and his colleagues showed in a paper published online October 26 in Nature that G....

By Reuters Staff NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women who want to have a baby after tubal sterilization and undergo in vitro fertilization (IVF) are likely to be as successful as their subfertile peers who have IVF, according to a study from Australia. In a paper online now in Contraception, the researchers say there is a “paucity of studies evaluating IVF success in women with previous tubal sterilization. Although IVF studies often include sterilized women in their overall sample, they do not separately report IVF success on this subgroup....

Like life, rocks on Earth evolve and “speciate.” Heat, water and oxygen drive the creation of new minerals—early collisions, melting and volcanic processes provide the necessary heating forces. Plate tectonics helps by pushing crustal elements and minerals down to new pressure conditions. Remarkably, on top of all that much of our planet’s mineral diversity today owes its existence to Earth’s life-forms and biological processes. Some 2.3 billion years ago newly formed bacteria transformed the carbon dioxide atmosphere into a more oxygen dominated one....

A potentially habitable alien planet — one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface — has been found around a nearby star. The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface. “It’s the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it’s not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze,” Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told SPACE....

By Jemima KellyNEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - The amount of oil found on Louisiana’s coast has surged this year, three years after BP’s Macondo spill in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, the state’s Coastal Protection & Restoration Authority said.Some 3.01 million pounds of “oily material” were cleaned up on Louisiana’s coast from March to August this year, up from 119,894 pounds in the same period last year, according to a report on the state Department of Natural Resources website....

Editor’s Note (8/11/16): The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is announcing today that it will keep marijuana illegal for any purpose (classified as a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act), but the government will soften rules for marijuana research to make it easier to grow the plant for scientific study. The following article was originally published in the lead-up to this decision. For neuroscientist Chuanhai Cao, the problem with the U....

Much of what we know about sex, or think we know, stems from the animal kingdom. No surprise there—we’re animals and the nuances of the genetic tango are easier to study in organisms larger than infinitesimal blobs. Trouble is, animal sex is specialized to the point of distraction. Most researchers have learned to avoid seeking universal sexual truths by examining animals’ twig on the tree of life, but some still rely heavily on single animal models whereas others hawk dated taxonomic ideas without realizing it, says protistologist Frederick Spiegel of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville....

You can find them everywhere in your own neighborhood—the older gentleman who sweeps the sidewalk in the mornings, the couple that’s always walking a pair of golden retrievers, the grumpy cashier at the supermarket. Chances are you’ve never had a conversation with most of these strangers, but you’ve made assumptions about who they are and what they’re like, to the point where you feel like you know them. Although scientists have long suspected our passive interactions with these sorts of “familiar strangers” may be more important than we realize, such encounters have gone largely unstudied....

By Brad Brooks RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Scientists have found dangerous drug-resistant “super bacteria” off beaches in Rio de Janeiro that will host Olympic swimming events and in a lagoon where rowing and canoe athletes will compete when the Games start on Aug. 5. The findings from two unpublished academic studies seen by Reuters concern Rio’s most popular spots for tourists and greatly increase the areas known to be infected by the microbes normally found only in hospitals....

To get an idea of what the universe looks like from Earth’s perspective, picture a big watermelon. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of the seeds, at the center of the fruit. The space around it, the pink flesh, is sprinkled with countless other seeds. Those are also galaxies that we—living inside that central seed—can observe through our telescopes. Because light travels at a finite speed, we see other galaxies as they were in the past....

Charles Darwin famously described the origin of species as the “mystery of mysteries,” a phrase he cribbed from the astronomer John Herschel, whom Darwin visited in Capetown, South Africa during the five-year round-the-world voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle. The meeting happened a few months after Darwin departed the Galapagos islands, at which point he had not yet solved the “grand mystery,” despite the myth that Darwin first understood the mechanism of evolution in this magnificent archipelago....