Another American election season has come and gone.  In San Francisco, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader of the House, campaigned only modestly, even in a year when voters turned on Democrats nationwide she was sure to get 80 percent of the vote, and once again she talked about abortion, saying that if Democrats were not in charge, they would be banned.

It is hard to imagine that 1 person out of 435 would cause a 40-year-old abortion law to be overturned but the implication has always been that the federal government must control it because of the dangers of 'back alley abortions' that were unsafe.

If you voted for a Democrat this week, it may not be because of the issues, it may be because your emotions caused you to gloss over facts, according to a paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Emotions are obviously powerful forces in human behavior and attitudes and to some extent they play an important role in guiding policy support. A paper by researchers at Tel Aviv University and the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya studied the interaction between emotion and political ideology, showing that the motivating power of emotions is not the same for those on different ends of the ideological spectrum. 

If you read the marketing claims for probiotics and supplements, and an alarming number of papers that have made spurious claims to feed the fad, you might think gut bacteria were the magic bullet for a lot of diseases.

A new paper says they even determine whether or not your jeans fit this week. Pizza and exercise are hereby absolved. Instead, the  types of microbes that grow in our body, influenced by our genetic makeup, influences whether we are fat or thin, according to a paper in Cell.

Heart attacks are often caused by conditions that affect electrical signaling in the heart. Genetic studies have linked two of these conditions, long QT syndrome and Brugada syndrome, to mutations in the sodium channels that let sodium ions into cells in response to electrical signals.  
A multidisciplinary team has been tracking the complex of proteins thought to be at fault in some cases of sudden cardiac death and now they have finally captured images of the complex. Those images reveal the connection between some genetic mutations and electrical abnormalities of the heart and provide a starting point for designing therapies.

Olaparib, an experimental twice-daily oral cancer drug, produces an overall tumor response rate of 26 percent in several advanced cancers associated with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations, according to results of a Phase II study.

Scientists believe that Eurasians separated into at least three populations around 36,000 years ago: Europeans,Asians and a mystery third lineage, all whose descendants would develop the unique features of most non-African peoples after interbreeding with Neanderthals. 

A new study on DNA recovered from a fossil of one of the earliest known Europeans, who lived 36,000 years ago in Kostenki, western Russia, has shown that the earliest European humans' genetic ancestry survived the Last Glacial Maximum - the peak point of the last ice age.