If a person commits a violent criminal act, there is a higher chance that a younger sibling will follow in their footsteps than an older one, according to a new paper.

It's been common sense for centuries that violent criminal behavior runs strongly in families but why is unclear. Blame is attributed to shared environmental factors such as poverty, divorce and poor parental supervision. 
This 'social transmission' of violent behaviors suggests that environmental factors within families can be important when it comes to delinquent behavior. 

Should food that has been genetically optimized have a special label attached to it by law?

Advocates say 'yes', it is about awareness, though actual implementations and efforts from California to Vermont are not about awareness, since they have made sure to exempt numerous products - everything from restaurants to alcohol to food at a deli need not have a GMO label. If the cows that make the milk that go into Stonybrook Farms yogurt eat GMO feed, the yogurt is just as organic. 

As it should be. To science, organic and genetic modification are simply different processes. Nothing about a cow munching on genetically modified food changes the milk.

Cancer vaccines haven't lived up to their promise in clinical trials and the reason, many researchers suspect, is that the immune cells that would help the body destroy the tumor – even those reactions boosted by cancer vaccines – are actively suppressed.

Cancer vaccines are designed to boost the body's natural defenses against cancer. They work by training the immune system to recognize and attack specific tumor peptides, which are a kind of identification tag for tumors. These peptide "tags" help the immune system find and attack cancer cells. There are three types of cells that can "see" and react to these tags: T-helper cells, cytotoxic T cells, and B cells, and researchers thought that all three were trained, or tolerized, to ignore the tags on cancer cells.

A new Neurogrid circuit board can simulate orders of magnitude more neurons and synapses than other brain mimics - on the power it takes to run a tablet computer.

For all their sophistication, computers pale in comparison to the brain. The modest cortex of the mouse, for instance, operates 9,000 times faster than a personal computer simulation of its functions. Not only is the PC slower, it takes 40,000 times more power to run, says Kwabena Boahen, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford.

It is generally well known that men have an overall shorter life expectancy compared to women. A recent study, led by Uppsala University researchers, shows a correlation between a loss of the Y chromosome in blood cells and both a shorter life span and higher mortality from cancer in other organs.

Men have a shorter average life span than women and both the incidence and mortality in cancer is higher in men than in women. However, the mechanisms and possible risk factors behind this sex-disparity are largely unknown. Alterations in DNA of normal cells accumulate throughout our lives and have been linked to diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

Would you sacrifice one person to save five?

Psychologists say those moral choices could depend on whether you are using a foreign language or your native tongue.

The new paper from the University of Chicago and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona finds that people using a foreign language take a relatively utilitarian approach to moral dilemmas, making decisions based on assessments of what's best for the common good. That pattern holds even when the utilitarian choice would produce an emotionally difficult outcome, such as sacrificing one life so others could live.