The society you live in can shape the complexity of your brain--and it does so differently for social insects than for humans and other vertebrate animals.

A new comparative study of social and solitary wasp species suggests that as social behavior evolved, the brain regions for central cognitive processing in social insect species shrank. This is the opposite of the pattern of brain increases with sociality that has been documented for several kinds of vertebrate animals including mammals, birds and fish.

A new study in Sweden links male infertility to autoimmune prostatic inflammation.  

Infertility - involuntary childlessness - is common, and in half of all cases attributable to infertility in the man. Although male infertility has many possible causes, it often remains unexplained. 

In the present study, researchers from Karolinska Institutet discovered a reason for reduced fertility in people with autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 1 (APS1), which increases the risk of developing autoimmune disease (caused by the immune system attacking and damaging healthy cells) and which is often used as a model for autoimmune disease in general. 

An immense cloud of hydrogen has been observed dispersing from the warm, Neptune-sized planet Gliese 436b orbiting nearby star Gliese 436. 

The enormous gaseous tail of the planet is about 50 times the size of the parent star.  A phenomenon this large has never before been seen around such a small exoplanet. 

There are more men in hard science and engineering and there are a variety of explanations for why, everything from the sexism notion, promoted by those in the social sciences, to the idea that the physical sciences and engineering don't seem directly related to helping people, which is an explanation offered by women who choose a life science or medicine. One odd notion, typified by prominent friend of Obama Dr. Larry Summers while he was at Harvard, was that women were not as good at math.

Well-practiced motor skills like riding a bike are extremely stable memories that can be effortlessly recalled after years or decades. In contrast, a new study shows that changes to motor skill memories occurring over the course of a single practice session are not immediately stable, according to researchers.

We're all familiar with the old saying that you never forget how to ride a bike and perhaps personally familiar with riding off on a bike years after last putting pedals under your feet. This experience highlights the incredible stability possible for motor skill memories, especially those for well-practiced skills. However, the stability of the new motor memories formed on the shorter timescale of a single practice session has been under debate.

Sexual dysfunction in women can be linked to low resting heart rate variability, a finding that could help clinicians treat the condition, according to a study by psychologists from The University of Texas at Austin.

Heart rate variability (HRV) -- the variation in the time intervals between a person's consecutive heartbeats -- can indicate how well an individual responds to physiological and environmental changes. Low resting heart rate variability has been associated with several mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety and alcohol dependence, as well as erectile dysfunction in men.