The idea of having to pay a sin tax for environmentally detrimental foods is gaining more support. For some, eating meat is a sin, and therefore meat products should be taxed like alcohol and tobacco.

A new report published recently by a British group called Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return Initiative (FAIRR) argues that a tax on meat is inevitable.

The vaccines used by commercial fish farmers are not protecting fish from disease, according to a new study.

The study was compiled by researchers at the University of Waterloo, the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso and Chile’s University of Valparaiso. It showed vaccinated fish tend to show more symptoms when contracting diseases, with the health impacts and ultimately deaths occurring as if they’d never received a vaccine.

A strip of chromatography paper similar to that used in rapid pregnancy tests is the basis of a bio-sensor for detecting malaria that has been developed by Brazilian researchers.

For decades, scientists have known that blue light will make fruit flies go blind, but it wasn’t clear why. Now, a Purdue University study has found how this light kills cells in the flies’ eyes, and that could prove a useful model for understanding human ocular diseases such as macular degeneration.

Wildfires, extreme storms and major weather events can seem like a distant threat, but for those whose lives have been directly impacted by these events, the threat hits much closer to home.

Air pollution trapped along the Wasatch Front by winter inversions are estimated to send more than 200 people to the emergency room with pneumonia each year, according to a study by University of Utah Health and Intermountain Healthcare. Bad air quality especially erodes the health of adults over age 65, a population particularly vulnerable to the effects of pneumonia.

Working memory is a sort of “mental sketchpad” that allows you to accomplish everyday tasks such as calling in your hungry family’s takeout order and finding the bathroom you were just told “will be the third door on the right after you walk straight down that hallway and make your first left.” It also allows your mind to go from merely responding to your environment to consciously asserting your agenda.

MIT biologists have designed a new peptide that can disrupt a key protein that many types of cancers, including some forms of lymphoma, leukemia, and breast cancer, need to survive.

Asthma costs the U.S. economy more than $80 billion annually in medical expenses, missed work and school days and deaths, according to new research published online in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.

 

Applied mathematics can be a powerful tool in helping predict the genesis and evolution of different types of cancers, a study from the University of Waterloo has found.