Modern smartphones are wonderful devices - they let us check email we won't reply to until we get to a desktop, they take pictures and sometimes they even make a poor quality phone call.

But that convenience comes with a price: it is easy to avoid thinking for ourselves, was a caution. And it is warranted, finds a paper in Computers in Human Behavior, which suggests that smartphone users who are intuitive thinkers, more prone to relying on gut feelings and instincts when making decisions, frequently use their device's search engine rather than their own brainpower.

People with diabetes are more prone to anxiety and depression than those with other chronic diseases that require similar levels of management. The reasons for this aren't well understood, but Joslin Diabetes Center researchers have discovered one potential explanation.

Genetically modifying mice to make their brains resistant to insulin, the Joslin scientists first found that the animals exhibited behaviors that suggest anxiety and depression, and then pinpointed a mechanism that lowers levels of the key neurotransmitter dopamine in areas of the brain associated with those conditions.

Here's the rub with friction -- scientists don't really know how it works. Sure, humans have been harnessing the power of friction since rubbing two sticks together to build the first fire, but the physics of friction remains largely in the dark.

In a new paper in Nature Materials, Brandeis University professor Zvonomir Dogic and his lab explored friction at the microscopic level. They discovered that the force generating friction is much stronger than previously thought. The discovery is an important step toward understanding the physics of the cellular and molecular world and designing the next generation of microscopic and nanotechnologies.

The research was conducted as part of the Brandeis University Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.

In a study of 2,609 patients from a pediatric intensive care unit in a children's hospital in Spain, investigators found that more boys than girls were admitted (57.5% vs. 42.5%) but death rates were higher in girls (4.9% vs. 3.3%).

Girls died from a broader range of causes while boys died most often from respiratory and polytraumatic injuries, which could reflect an increased likelihood to engage in risky activities or behave more carelessly, the authors conclude.

"The unexpected female vulnerability that we have found could be partly explained by differences in age and occurrence of nosocomial infection," said Dr. Maria Esther Esteban, senior author of the American Journal of Human Biology study. "This should be explored in future research."

A small experiment has found that people are quicker to categorize a face as being male when it is shown to the left side of the brain. 

The conclusion was drawn from an analysis of responses from 42 volunteers who were asked to focus on a cross in the center of a computer screen. They were then shown faces, which were morphed from 100 percent male to 100 percent female across 280 trials, and were asked to categorize the faces as either female or male as quickly as possible. 

When an image was presented to the left side of the brain, it was generally considered more male, even though it was correctly perceived as more female when presented to the right side of the brain. 

A new study shows that alcohol consumption of individuals appears to increase with the number of friends in their drinking group.

Most alcohol use among young people occurs in a social context, and peer substance use has long been established as an important predictor of alcohol and other substance use among youngsters. Past research suggests that the mere presence of others seems to have an effect on drinking behaviour, but most of those studies relied on data gathered from experiments performed in artificial laboratory settings or from surveys conducted after drinking sessions have ended, which are notoriously inaccurate.