A new paper says a hockey player's birthday strongly biases how professional teams assess his talent. 

The authors found that, on average, National Hockey League (NHL) draftees born between July and December are much more likely than those born in the first three months of the year to have successful careers. In particular, 34 percent of draftees were born in the last six months of the year, but these individuals played 42 percent of the games and scored 44 percent of the points accumulated by those in the study. By contrast, those born in the first three months of the year constituted 36 percent of draftees but only played 28 percent of the games and only scored 25 percent of the points.

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The presence of an animal can significantly increase positive social behaviors in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), according to a new paper.

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Obesity rates across Canada are at alarming levels and continuing to climb, according to a new paper in the Canadian Journal of Public Health, which provides the first comprehensive look at adult obesity rates across Canada since 1998 - complete with "obesity maps."

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If you liked FoxTrax, that glowing hockey puck shooting around the ice during NHL games, you will love what engineers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Electro-Communications (UEC) in Tokyo have done: they put a camera inside a football.

The camera is embedded in the side of a rubber-sheathed plastic foam football can record video while the ball is in flight. Want a ball's-eye view of the playing field? Now you have it. But because a football can spin at 600 rpm, the raw video is an unwatchable blur so the researchers also developed a computer algorithm that converts the raw video into a stable, wide-angle view.

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Scientists say they have done laboratory resurrections of several 2 to 3 billion-year-old proteins, ancient ancestors of the enzymes that enable today's antibiotic-resistant bacteria to shrug off huge doses of penicillins, cephalosporins and other modern drugs.

Antibiotic resistance existed long before Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic in 1928. Genes that contain instructions for making the proteins responsible for antibiotic resistance have been found in 30,000-year-old permafrost sediment and other ancient sites. The new study research focused on beta-lactamases, enzymes responsible for resistance to the family of antibiotics that includes penicillin, which scientists believe originated billions of years ago.

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Older people who don't expect a satisfying future may be more likely to live longer, healthier lives than those who see brighter days ahead, according to a paper in
Psychology and Aging. 

Scholars examined data collected from 1993 to 2003 for the national German Socio-Economic Panel, an annual survey of private households consisting of approximately 40,000 people 18 to 96 years old. The researchers divided the data according to age groups: 18 to 39 years old, 40 to 64 years old and 65 years old and above.

Through mostly in-person interviews, respondents were asked to rate how satisfied they were with their lives and how satisfied they thought they would be in five years.

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Trust fools you into remembering that your partner was more considerate and less hurtful than they actually were, say psychologists who examined the role of trust in biasing memories of transgressions in romantic partnerships. 

People who are highly trusting tended to remember transgressions in a way that benefits the relationship, remembering partner transgressions as less severe than they originally reported them to be. People low on trust demonstrated the opposite pattern, remembering partner transgressions as being more severe than how they originally reported them to be, they concluded. 

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Preclinical, laboratory studies suggest immunotherapy could potentially work like a vaccine against metastatic cancers.

Results from the recent study show the therapy could treat metastatic cancers and be used in combination with current cancer therapies while helping to prevent the development of new metastatic tumors and train specialized immune system cells to guard against cancer relapse.

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Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, say life expectancy changes have been so rapid since 1900 that "72 is the new 30" - by that, they mean primitive hunter gatherers had the same odds of dying at age 30 as a modern man in the developed world faces at age 72.

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The English know they drink too much alcohol, but they all think it is someone else doing it. In actuality, as many as 75% of people in England are drinking in excess of the recommended daily alcohol limit, according to a new paper in the European Journal of Public Health.

The scholars investigated the potential public health implications related to the under-reporting of alcohol consumption. International surveys have shown that self-reported alcohol consumption only accounts for between 40 and 60 per cent of alcohol sales- that discrepancy reveasl the potential impact of this 'missing' alcohol on public health.

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In January of 2012, the United States Department of Agriculture passed a series of regulations designed to make school lunches more nutritious, which included requiring schools to increase whole grain foods and forcing students to select either a fruit or vegetable with their purchased lunch. 

This led to athletes and other students to claim they were not getting enough calories and complaints from advocates for poor children that, since it is the best meal some children might get during the day, it should not be focused on social engineering. Trash cans filled with fruit didn't help things. 

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In a two-year sub-study of the STAMPEDE (Surgical Therapy And Medications Potentially Eradicate Diabetes Efficiently) trial, researchers  evaluated the effects of bariatric surgery and intensive medical therapy on blood sugar levels, body composition, and pancreatic beta-cell function
and found that gastric bypass surgery reverses diabetes by uniquely restoring pancreatic function in moderately obese patients with uncontrolled type 2 diabetes.

Striking metabolic changes were observed in patients who underwent bariatric surgery compared with intensive medical therapy, particularly in the gastric bypass treatment group.

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A group of progenitor cells in the inner ear that can become the sensory hair cells and adjacent supporting cells that enable hearing have been identified, a potential breakthrough for people suffering from hearing loss due to damaged or impaired sensory hair cells, according to a paper in Development.

The inner ear is a highly specialized structure for gathering and transmitting vibrations in the air. The auditory compartment, called the cochlea, is a snail-shaped cavity that houses specialized cells with hair-like projections that sense vibration, much like seaweed waving in the ocean current. These hair cells are responsible for both hearing and balance, and are surrounded by supporting cells that are also critical for hearing.

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A new paper in the Journal of Pediatrics
says low-birth-weight babies with a particular brain abnormality are at greater risk for autism, and it could provide a signpost for early detection of the poorly understood disorder.

The authors found that low-birth-weight newborns were seven times more likely to be diagnosed with autism later in life if an ultrasound taken just after birth showed they had enlarged ventricles, cavities in the brain that store spinal fluid.  

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Activists love wind power the way they once loved ethanol and natural gas - it is good until scientists show them it is not. 

Claims that there is no upper bound for wind power, that it is scalable because gusts and breezes don't seem likely to "run out" on a global scale, are not based on reality.  And neither are claims that the generating capacity of large-scale wind farms is unlimited. 

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Climate change causing every weather event enjoyed the kind of fallacious media coverage in late 2012 it hadn't gotten since 2006 - it remains bad science. While short-term weather is notoriously volatile, climate is more of an average weather pattern over a long period of time. This dichotomy provides the analytical framework for scientific thinking about atmospheric variability, including climate change.

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Researchers have reported the results of a 10-year, double-blind randomized controlled trial in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and  found that the infants of mothers who were given 600 milligrams of the omega-3 fatty acid DHA during pregnancy weighed more at birth and were less likely to be very low birth weight and born before 34 weeks gestation than infants of mothers who were given a placebo.

This result greatly strengthens the case for using the dietary supplement during pregnancy. A follow-up of this sample of infants is ongoing to determine whether prenatal DHA nutritional supplementation will benefit children's intelligence and school readiness.

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Thanks to No Child Left Behind, the gender gap in math skills tests disappeared for the first time in history.  But a new paper says the issue might never have been there if the format for math competitions was different - rather than one-shot events, switch to rounds.

Twenty-four local elementary schools in a 
Journal of Economic Behavior&Organization article changed the math format to go across five different rounds. Once the first round was over, girls performed as well or better than boys for the rest of the contest.

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