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A recent study published in JAMA Pediatrics suggests that the legalization of same-sex marriage is associated with a reduction in the proportion of high school students who reported making a suicide attempt. This study indicates that governmental policies regarding non-normative sexuality may have an influence on mental health outcomes for adolescents.

The study used data from the state-level Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which tracks dangerous and risky behaviors exhibited by teenagers. Its authors used data from forty-seven states, including thirty-two states that implemented same-sex marriage policies between 2004-2015. They looked at suicide behaviors in the full population of high school students and then did a secondary analysis using the subset of students who self-identified as belonging to a sexual minority (gay, lesbian, bisexual, or unsure about their sexual identity).

One limitation of using this type of data is that it depends on self-reporting of suicide attempts, which is tricky because suicide attempts are typically under-reported. This approach also means that the researchers did not include any information about teens who died from their suicide attempts; it only captures teens who attempted suicide but survived. This methodological limitation may seem like a big one, but the proportion of suicide attempts that result in teen deaths is very small, so suicide attempts are reasonable proxy for overall teen mental health.

(credit: Credit: JJ Harrison, via Wikimedia)

Malaria, a potentially deadly mosquito-borne infection, remains a problem in many parts of the world. Reducing infections has been challenging because no vaccine is currently available. Prevention efforts have mostly concentrated on eliminating the transmission vector, mosquitoes. A recent study published in Nature shows that a new vaccine for malaria is well tolerated by humans and can provide significant immunity to malaria.

Malaria is caused by infection of the protozoan parasite Plasmodium falciparum. These are complex cells that have a number of means to evade the immune system, which has made the creation of vaccines challenging. To make this new vaccine, the parasites were first rendered harmless via radiation and then rapidly frozen for preservation. Healthy adult volunteers were given three doses of this vaccine at 28-day intervals before being challenged with exposure to the malaria parasite. Under these conditions, nine out of the nine immunized participants avoided a malaria infection.

Additionally, subjects who received non-optimized concentrations of the vaccine dose still exhibited some protection against infection, with one-third or two-thirds of vaccinated people demonstrating immunity, depending on the dose.

Enlarge / Say hello to the Alienware 13 R3. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

It’s a good time to be in the market for a gaming laptop that doesn’t look stupid. Higher-powered laptops have begun to tick crucial checkboxes across the board, with smaller, super-powered GPUs landing in much less garish designs. In some cases, the result is a laptop you’ll love using—and won’t be ashamed to be seen using in public.

One of the latest to catch our eye is Alienware’s “R3” update to its 13-inch model. While some of its SKUs may not win affordability awards, the R3 officially counts as a damned good laptop, gaming or otherwise. If your budget has room for a single portable productivity machine, Alienware might have the right balance of power, weight, design, and functionality for you, not to mention decent battery life in a pinch.

But first, let’s talk about this laptop’s tushie.

Enlarge / These mice are about to have issues. (credit: Getty | Portland Press Herald )

In mice with either type I or type 2 diabetes, an intense, four-day fasting diet seemed to regenerate pancreas cells and restore insulin production. Researchers reported this finding on Thursday in Cell.

In Petri dish experiments, human pancreas cells from patients with type 1 diabetes also showed altered gene expression and kick-started insulin production after being exposed to blood from people on a fasting diet.

The results of the early work are promising for potential dietary treatments of both types of diabetes. Type I is caused by a loss of insulin production, while type 2 is caused by diminished production or insensitivity to insulin, a hormone that triggers the breakdown of sugar in the blood.

Expansion driven by dark energy is now overwhelming the effect of gravity. (credit: Photograph by Copyright Nobel Media)

Two decades ago, scientists found that the Universe’s expansion is accelerating. This was the complete opposite of what had been expected: the expansion should be slowing down due to gravity, not speeding up.

At first, researchers didn’t know how to account for it. But they went back to Einstein’s equations for his General Theory of Relativity and discovered that a term he’d abandoned as his “biggest blunder”—the cosmological constant—actually described this expansion pretty well. There was only one problem: we can’t see the energy that’s driving the expansion. Nonetheless, researchers have gravitated to the idea that the energy is there, and they've labeled it dark energy. With time, dark energy has become a cornerstone of our current model of the Universe.

But not everyone was convinced. Some wondered if there was another way to explain the Universe’s accelerating expansion. One possibility is that gravity doesn’t work the same way on cosmological scales as it does on local scales. The idea is appealing in that it doesn’t require the existence of a vast amount of stuff that we can’t figure out how to observe. While the idea hasn't gained much traction, it also hasn't been ruled out.

Enlarge (credit: Ore Huiying/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A woman in Minnesota has sued Uber, alleging that one of the company's drivers attempted to rape her in August 2016.

As is the case in other sexual assault lawsuits involving the ride-sharing company, the woman argues that Uber has been negligent in its hiring practices. The company, she claims, is not as safe as it purports to be.

Uber has faced numerous similar legal battles in recent years. Last month, a New Jersey man sued the company over an alleged assault that he sustained after his driver apparently refused to take him from Philadelphia back to his hometown, nine miles away. Last year, two women in Boston settled their lawsuit with Uber on similar allegations of sexual assault.

Enlarge (credit: Owen Duffy)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com—and let us know what you think.

Welcome to a world of unimaginable wealth and rampant inequality, a world where monolithic corporations act as a law unto themselves, where automation and technological progress threaten to undermine the very foundations of society, and where frightened, forgotten, and furious citizens turn in droves towards political extremism.

This is Fantasy Flight's dystopian Android universe. While you could be forgiven for mistaking it for the world of 2017, it’s actually a cyberpunk setting best known as the backdrop for the card game Android: Netrunner, which pits elite hackers against corporate security systems.