There is broad consensus today that personality traits are best described by the "Big Five": Extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. Each of these broad measures can be broken down into smaller ones, but in general, this taxonomy appears to take in most of what we think of as personhood. When you think of someone as "steady" or "flaky" or "gloomy" or "daring," what you’re really doing is unconsciously taking a measure of these five traits and crunching them together.

Common practice in the treatment of adolescent eating disorder patients has been to exclude the parents. Many experts consider parents part of the problem and thus keep them away during therapy.

Two U.S.–based clinicians disagree and have written a "how to" book published in February that includes family in the treatment of these patients. They say parents are well poised to help their children overcome bulimia nervosa, a disorder characterized by binging and purging.

Texas wheat offers high quality when it comes to baking and milling characteristics, said Texas Agricultural Experiment Station's state wheat breeder.

Dr. Jackie Rudd, Experiment Station wheat breeder at Amarillo, received the annual Millers' Award from Tim Aschbrenner of Cereal Food Processors at the recent Wheat Quality Council annual meeting in Kansas City.

Oceanographers have completed an important step in constructing the first deep-sea observatory off the continental United States. Workers in the multi-institution effort laid 32 miles (52 kilometers) of cable along the Monterey Bay sea floor that will provide electrical power to scientific instruments, video cameras, and robots 3,000 feet (900 meters) below the ocean surface. The link will also carry data from the instruments back to shore, for use by scientists and engineers from around the world.

University of Cincinnati (UC) neuroradiologists believe a brain imaging approach that combines standard magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans with specialized contrast-enhanced techniques could lead to more effective diagnoses in patients with difficult-to-detect blood clots in veins of the brain.

James Leach, MD, reports these findings in the April issue of the American Journal of Neuroradiology. This is the first study to correlate the clinical importance of data gleaned from standard MRI scans and detailed contrast-enhanced imaging techniques in patients with chronic thrombosis (blood clots) in veins of the brain.

The double sunset that Luke Skywalker gazed upon in the film "Star Wars" might not be a fantasy.

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have observed that planetary systems – dusty disks of asteroids, comets and possibly planets – are at least as abundant in twin-star systems as they are in those, like our own, with only one star. Since more than half of all stars are twins, or binaries, the finding suggests the universe is packed with planets that have two suns.