Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Psychology
Blood marker may predict suicide
People who killed themselves had higher levels of a gene involved in cell death.
- Health & Medicine
Power of sugar may come from the mind
Only people who believe exertion zaps willpower get a boost from glucose.
- Life
Years or decades later, flu exposure still prompts immunity
New forms of influenza viruses can spur production of antibodies to past pandemics in people who lived through them.
- Psychology
Highlights from the American Sociological Association annual meeting
Research on social media's reluctant users, marital ideals and single parenthood and intimate victims of cybernastiness presented August 10-13 in New York City.
- Health & Medicine
Clues emerge to explain allergic asthma
Tests in mice reveal that allergens can trigger inflammation by cleaving a clotting protein.
- Health & Medicine
Gut-brain communication failure may spur overeating
Restoring a depleted molecule in obese mice repaired their abnormal response to food.
- Psychology
Mental disorder seen as ‘badness, not sickness’
Health workers tend to consider borderline personality disorder a tag for patients who are difficult or impossible to treat.
- Health & Medicine
Racial homogeneity in early childhood may affect brain
In lab study, kids who lived in single-race orphanages have difficulty interpreting emotions on faces with foreign features.
- Health & Medicine
Mediterranean diet may offset genetic risk for stroke
Compared to a low-fat diet, eating fish and olive oil kept blood sugar levels lower in people with a common diabetes risk factor.
- Psychology
Ratio for a good life exposed as ‘nonsense’
A heralded calculation of people’s ability to flourish is a mathematical mirage, researchers say.
- Humans
DNA reveals details of the peopling of the Americas
Migrants came in three distinct waves that interbred once in the New World.
- Tech
Online ‘likes’ multiply themselves
Social media users swayed by previous ratings, researchers find when they randomly assign positive and negative votes.
