Ashley Westerman

The prairie town of Enid, Okla. — population 50,122 — is best known as the state's "wheat capital." Enid is also home to a community of around 2,000 people who were born in the Marshall Islands. Most are low-income and struggling to get health care.

A single season playing football might be all it takes to change a young athlete's brain.

Those are the preliminary findings of research presented this week in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

Researchers used special MRI methods to look at nerve bundles in the brain in a study of the brains of 26 young male football players, average age 12, before and after one season. Twenty-six more young males who didn't play football also got MRI scans at the same time to be used as a control group.

Anyone who owns a cat knows the furry beasts can spend an inordinate amount of time grooming themselves. Cats take that sandpaper tongue of theirs and just lick and lick and lick and lick for literally hours a day. But researchers are discovering more about what that tongue, with its hundreds of tiny, backward-facing spines called papillae, is doing.

Roger Chui first learned about the mass shooting that killed 12 people in a packed bar Wednesday night in Thousand Oaks, Calif., when he woke up the morning after and turned on his phone.

"And I was like 'Oh, that seems really soon after Pittsburgh and Louisville,' " says the software developer in Lexington, Ky. "I thought we'd get more of a break."

Chui feels like these kinds of shootings happen in the U.S. so often now that when he hears about them all he can think about is, "Oh well, it happened again I guess."

He's not alone.