News Articles

A new review has found evidence that a specific gene is linked to suicidal behavior, which may be one of the many complex causes of suicide. In the past, studies have implicated the gene for brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in suicidal behavior. BDNF is involved in the development of the nervous system. After pooling results from 11 previous studies and adding their own study data involving people with schizophrenia, scientists writing in
the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology  found that among people with a psychiatric diagnosis, those with the methionine ("met") variation of the gene had a higher risk of suicidal behavior compared to those with the valine variation. 

It took years of mismanagement, printing Monopoly money by the federal government, and runaway unemployment to get groups claiming to represent 99% of Americans protesting progressive fiscal policy on Wall Street and in other cities.You may disagree on the purity of that movement, since the Teamsters and the education unions are funding this stuff and are not exactly friends of the little guy (try to get a job in NYC without being in their union) but one thing no one will disagree with; if you take away coffee, 100% of Americans will riot.

Hypothetically, if someone told you that a hypothetical question can influence your judgments or behavior, would you believe them?

It's "Second Life"...for monkeys.  And a lot more real.   Scientists have demonstrated a two-way interaction between a primate brain and a virtual body - they learned to employ brain activity alone to move an avatar hand and even identify the texture of virtual objects. 

Did comets deliver a significant portion of the Earth's oceans millions of years after the Earth formed?  Some new evidence in Nature lends weight to the idea.Using HiFi, the Heterodyne Instrument for the Infrared on the Hershel Space Observatory, researchers found that the ice on a comet called Hartley 2 has the same chemical composition as our oceans. Both have similar D/H ratios - the proportion of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, in the water. A deuterium atom is a hydrogen with an extra neutron in its nucleus. This was the first time ocean-like water was detected in a comet.

Bribery and corruption rise and fall with the level of collective feeling in a society, according to research by Pankaj Aggarwal, University of Toronto Scarborough professor of marketing in the Department of Management, and Nina Mazar, University of Toronto professor of marketing.Aggarwal and Mazar say that people in more collectivist cultures, where individuals have more communal belief and see themselves as interdependent with larger society, are more likely to offer bribes than people from more individualistic cultures where independence and freedom are more valued. Their work suggests that people in collectivist societies may feel less individual responsibility for their actions and therefore less guilty about offering a bribe.

We've done articles on rainbows, and double rainbows and even showed you how to make a rainbow appear for that special someone - but have you ever seen a triple rainbow?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 33.8 percent of American adults are obese. placing them at increased risk for type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers.  That's a lot of fat, but not all fat is bad.When we picture body fat, what we are thinking of is white fat but another type, brown fat, does more - it burns body fat.  It was once believed that brown fat disappeared after infancy but recent advances in imaging technology led to its rediscovery in adult humans

Women often gain weight as they age and a new study in Cell Metabolism says the sex hormone estrogen, and estrogen receptor-α (ERα) has an important yet under-appreciated role in those bigger waistlines. 

Musical cartoons can boost verbal intelligence?  We'll hiatus Science 2.0 and start watching "Phineas&Ferb" right now.Researchers writing in Psychological Science say pre-schoolers improved their skill after only 20 days of classroom instruction using their interactive, music-based cognitive training cartoons.

A daily supplement to reduce diabetes?   Maybe. Researchers writing in Cell Metabolism show they have have restored normal blood sugar metabolism in diabetic mice using, nicotinamide mononucleotide(NMN), a compound the body makes naturally and which plays a vital role in how cells use energy.All cells in the body make NMN in a chain of reactions leading to production of NAD, a vital molecule that harvests energy from nutrients and puts it into a form cells can use. Among other things, NAD activates a protein called SIRT1 that has been shown to promote healthy metabolism throughout the body, from the pancreas to the liver to muscle and fat tissue.

We've all read about efforts to provide amputees with robotic limbs and we know that  deep brain stimulation can relieve a range of Parkinson and OCD symptoms - a Tel Aviv University researcher has combined those ideas and gone a step farther and successfully implanted a robotic cerebellum into the skull of a rodent with brain damage, restoring its capacity for movement.