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In January the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the amphetamine Vyvanse as the first drug for binge-eating disorder (BED). Four days later former tennis star Monica Seles appeared on Good Morning America to discuss her long-time struggle with BED, and public service announcements (PSAs) began to run on national television to raise awareness about the disorder, urging concerned viewers to talk to their doctors. It soon came to light that Seles was a paid spokesperson for Shire, the drug company that makes Vyvanse, and that the company had also sponsored the television PSAs....

A three-year, government-funded effort to track the movement of greenhouse gases throughout the atmosphere has yielded surprising results that could help improve the accuracy of climate models. Researchers used a specially equipped plane for a series of pole-to-pole flights to measure the concentrations of greenhouse gases and black carbon particles at different altitudes, different locations and different times of the year. Scientists hope to use the data to better map sources and sinks of heat-trapping substances, including carbon dioxide, methane and black carbon....

The doughnut-shaped machine swallows the nun, who is outfitted in a plain T-shirt and loose hospital pants rather than her usual brown habit and long veil. She wears earplugs and rests her head on foam cushions to dampen the device’s roar, as loud as a jet engine. Supercooled giant magnets generate intense fields around the nun’s head in a high-tech attempt to read her mind as she communes with her deity....

The past couple of years have witnessed a string of disappointing results from long-term studies looking for the benefits of certain diets against chronic disease. First, fruits and vegetables showed no sign of protecting against cancer in general. Then high-fiber eaters found themselves as cancer-prone as the rest. To cap it off, a low-fat diet did nothing to ward off heart disease and colorectal cancer. Given the anti-cancer magic some of us have come to expect from our broccoli and other dietetic food, a question comes to mind: are researchers even doing the studies correctly?...

A group of mechanical engineering students are working on a project that will fly drones into the middle of tornadoes in an effort to learn more about the inner workings of these destructive storms. Warren Causey, the founder of the “Sirens Project,” said this better understanding could lead to increased warning times for incoming tornadoes. “We’re looking for patterns in supercell thunderstorms to differentiate which ones will produce tornadoes and which ones won’t,” said the 23-year-old mechanical engineering student at Southern Polytechnic State University in Georgia....

Dear EarthTalk: I know that purchasing organic crib sheets, mattresses and baby clothes is better for the environment—but do they make any difference in terms of the baby’s health? —B. B., Fairfield, Conn. It’s true that conventional baby clothing and bedding—conventional referring to that made with cotton grown using synthetic pesticides and fertilizers and bleached and dyed with yet more harsh chemicals—hasn’t seemed to present a problem thus far for generations and generations of babies....

In Google Maps, the distance-measuring tool offers a choice of three unit systems: Metric, English or “I’m Feeling Geeky.” If you click the third one, you’re offered a long list of, ahem, somewhat uncommon measurement units, including parsecs, Persian cubits, and Olympic swimming pools. Mac OS X’s text-to-speech feature, meanwhile, lets you endow your Mac with any of dozens of different human voices. Each speaks a funny sample sentence. The Fred voice says, “I sure like being inside this fancy computer....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Ticks that can spread Lyme disease now live in almost half of U.S. counties, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Varieties of the blacklegged tick that may carry Borrelia burgdorferi responsible for Lyme disease are present in 45% of counties nationwide, compared with just 30% in 1998, researchers found. “It’s important for people to be aware that there may be ticks in areas where they haven’t seen them previously so that they can take steps to help protect themselves and their families,” lead study author Rebecca Eisen, a research biologist at the CDC, said by email....

Dear EarthTalk: Don’t all these huge snow and ice storms across the country mean that the globe isn’t really warming? I’ve never seen such a winter! – Mark Franklin, Helena, MT On the surface it certainly can appear that way. But just because some of us are suffering through a particularly cold and snowy winter doesn’t refute the fact that the globe is warming as we continue to pump carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere....

Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in 2008. We are reposting a version of it in light of the death of Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs from complications from pancreatic cancer. Patients tend to die shortly after diagnosis, but Jobs was unusual in that he survived seven years after he got the bad news (he had a less aggressive form of the cancer). Overall, the odds of a patient living five years is just 5....

Salvador Galo Anselmo Dalí i Domènech was born to Felipa Domènech i Ferrés and Salvador Dalí i Cusí on October 12, 1901, in the town of Figueres in Catalonia, Spain. The couple’s firstborn child, he showed signs of great precociousness, but his potential was tragically cut short. Little Salvador fell sick with gastroenteritis and died just two months shy of his second birthday. His parents were devastated but, in their grief, conceived another child....

Pressure is mounting on President Obama and Capitol Hill Democrats to show significant progress on global warming legislation in time for a major U.N. climate summit in December. “The Danes, the Chinese, the Europeans, the Australians, the Japanese—everybody is almost singularly focused on what is the United States going to bring to the table,” said Jake Schmidt, international policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Obama and congressional leaders say their goal is to pass a new climate law by the Copenhagen talks, a Herculean accomplishment, given the dynamics in Congress and given that there are only five months left before diplomats head to Denmark....

Juno Therapeutics, a pioneer in the sizzling field of treating cancer by revving up the immune system, on Thursday said it had halted development of its lead treatment after three patient deaths, dealing a blow to a promising but still unproven approach to oncology called CAR-T immunotherapy. The treatment, dubbed JCAR015, is created by harvesting a patient’s own immune cells and rewiring them to home in on cancer in the blood....

Astronomers have long argued that the phrase “we are stardust” is more than poetic language. Now new evidence adds another stanza to this great cosmic verse. Dust from silica—a common component of Earth’s core, sandy beaches, concrete, glass and even cell phones—has been detected within the remnants of two supernovae in the Milky Way galaxy. These observations, described last October in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, provide the first evidence that silica originated within exploding stars....

The brain can be a messy place. Thankfully, it has good plumbing: Scientists have just discovered a cleansing river inside the brain, a fluid stream that might be enlisted to flush away the buildup of proteins associated with Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and other neurodegenerative disorders. The researchers, based at the University of Rochester (U.R.), University of Oslo and Stony Brook University, describe this new system in the journal Science Translational Medicine today....

China’s greenhouse gas emissions are on a downward trajectory, but its emissions may not have fallen quite as much over the past two years as the Chinese government and the International Energy Agency have suggested. That’s the conclusion of a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, which says China’s emissions may have actually increased in 2014, rather than fallen. The International Energy Agency estimated last year that both the decline in China’s coal use and falling electricity demand reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 1....

Mention the term microbiome, and most people will quickly think of the gut, probiotics and maybe even fecal microbial transplantation. But it actually refers to the all of the genetic material found in the microbes that live on and in the human body, including yeasts, bacteria and viruses. The vagina has a microbiome, too—even if research on it is lagging behind that done on the microbiomes of other parts of the body....

From Nature magazine. Soon after Joseph Francis learned that his levels of ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol sat at twice the norm, he discovered the short­comings of cholesterol-lowering drugs — and of the clinical advice guiding their use. Francis, the director of clinical analysis and reporting at the Veterans Health Administration (VA) in Washington DC, started taking Lipitor (atorvastatin), a cholesterol-lowering statin and the best-selling drug in pharmaceutical history. His LDL plummeted, but still hovered just above a target mandated by clinical guidelines....

A team of researchers says it has found in a Russian mineral sample the first natural example of a quasicrystal, an unusual material that displays some of the properties of a crystal but boasts a more intricate and complex structure. Since quasicrystals were characterized 25 years ago, numerous versions have been cooked up in the laboratory, but a natural example would indicate that nature’s products are more diverse than previously thought....

The United Nations’ top food agency announced yesterday that world food prices hit a record high last month, igniting concerns among agricultural experts who are thinking back to the food riots that gripped developing countries just three years ago. “It’s a worrisome situation with prices this high,” said Dan Gustafson, the director of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s Washington, D.C., office. “The year ahead is what I think is the real concern at this point....