Science News writer Nathan Seppa talks with physicians about people opting out of vaccinations.

Discussing how physicians and patients can cure their misunderstandings of medical statistics.

Researchers are just beginning to explore the genetic landscape of the cradle of humanity

Chunks of the genome appear to be disposable and many healthy people do without substantial stretches of DNA, Science News reports from the American Society of Human Genetics meetings in Honolulu, Hawaii

More dispatches from the 47th annual New Horizons in Science meeting, sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and held this year in Austin, Texas.

Magicians and neuroscientists may not seem like a likely match, but they have one important thing in common: A fascination with the brain, Science News reporter Laura Sanders reports in this blog filed from the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Chicago. As Science News pointed out in an article about science and magic in April, neuroscientists delve deep into the human mind to see how things like attention, perception and memory work, while magicians manipulate these very same things to confound their audience. This unlikely alliance was solidified October 17 at the Society for Neuroscience’s Annual Meeting in Chicago as two world-class magicians demonstrated some of their tricks to an audience of thousands of neuroscientists.

Droughts were actually good times for early humans, helping to develop skills for survival in other parts of the world, Lisa Grossman reports in a blog from the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing's New Horizons in Science meeting.

Psychologist combs through “behavioral residue” to assess personalities.

Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg suggests many would be horrified if all the LHC discovers is its prime target, the Higgs boson. Tom Siegfried and others blog from the 47th annual New Horizons in Science meeting sponsored by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing in Austin, Texas.

This isn’t a cop convention. These are marine mammal biologists, but they do care about speed limits. At the 18th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals, Science News reporter Susan Milius blogs about manatee researcher Edmund Gerstein's work on boat speeds and gory collisions with manatees. Gerstein is the guy at this meeting who has been arguing what sounds just backward at first. In circumstances such as murky water, he says, slow boats are more likely to hit manatees than are fast boats: Slow boats don’t make as much noise within the manatee hearing range, he says. So when manatees have to rely on sound to detect boats, the animals don’t pick up the warning until too late. There's also news on how well -- or not well -- speed limits set for boats that frequent the same waters as right whales are being followed.