If you like coffee, here is a delightful taste of confirmation bias. If you usually make fun of epidemiology, put your skepticism back in the pot, because coffee reduces diabetes.

As many as 380 million people worldwide have diabetes, with an economic estimate of up to $548 billion, making it one of the most significant global health problems in terms of pretend money no one earned. 
The Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC) has brewed up its annual diabetes report outlining the latest research on coffee and type 2 diabetes and its delicious news. 

The research round up report concludes that regular, moderate consumption of coffee may decrease an individual's risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Key research findings include:

We may talk about a battle of the sexes when it comes to our species, but in the rest of the primate world, it really is a battle. We have the luxury of cultural hand-wringing about the shirt a Rosetta mission engineer wore in a YouTube video, but when it comes to chimpanzees, a shirt is the least of female problems.

Male on female violence among chimpanzees is frequent - and it has to do with sex. 

Frightening experiences stick with us but a new study finds that the bonding hormone oxytocin inhibits the fear center in the brain and allows fear stimuli to subside more easily. 

With over one billion people worldwide using social media, including 80 percent of employees using private sharing sites at work, members have been scrambling to insist that not only does it not negatively affect their work performance, but that it improves it. Yahtzee! probably wishes they could get the kind of free public relations Twitter gets.

Few studies have been done to examine the issue. Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Cecilie Schou Andreassen and colleagues at the University of Bergen looked at the consequences of the use of social media during working hours.

 Everyone inherits two copies of most genes, one copy from each parent. In a recent study, researchers found in a rare mutation, people with one inactive copy of the gene NPC1L1 appeared to be protected against high LDL cholesterol, commonly called the "bad" cholesterol, and coronary heart disease, a narrowing of the heart's arteries that can lead to heart attacks. 

This mutation meant a 50 percent reduction in the risk of heart attack, at least epidemiologically, according to the paper
in The New England Journal of Medicine. NPC1L1 is of interest because it is the target of the drug ezetimibe, often prescribed to lower cholesterol.

Uranus is generally boring but it recently got interesting. It has become so stormy, with enormous cloud systems so bright, that for the first time ever amateur astronomers are able to see details in the planet's hazy blue-green atmosphere.