Scientists should be good at judging the importance of the scientific work of others - it's a peer review culture - but a new paper instead says that scientists are unreliable judges of the importance of fellow researchers' published papers.

They're better at it than you. But still pretty bad at it, according to the authors.

Prof. Eyre-Walker and Dr. Nina Stoletzki analyzed three methods of assessing published studies, using two sets of peer-reviewed articles. The three assessment methods the researchers looked at were:

A study to see whether narrowing of the veins from the brain to the heart could be a cause of multiple sclerosis has found that the condition is just as prevalent in people without the disease.

The results call into question a controversial theory that MS is associated with a disorder proponents call chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI).

America and the UK are sarcastic nations. Maybe they care too much. Children learn early to recognize sarcasm, especially if they have greater empathy, according to a new study.

For children, sarcastic language can be difficult to understand, but they generally begin to recognize sarcasm between ages 6 and 8, especially familiar sarcastic praise such as "Thanks a lot!" and "Nice going!" Some children take much longer to begin to understand sarcasm and the authors of the paper investigated whether differences in the ability of children to empathize with others might help to explain why.

A new paper analyzed organizational change in state health-related departments from 1990 to 2009. The researchers discovered that in many cases states kept the same organizational structure in place during the 20-year period, even though consolidating public health departments with Medicaid departments did occur with some frequency.

27 states had housed the two functions together at one point in the 20-year period. And when they did so, the funding allocated to the public health department remained unchanged. The authors conclude that the results help allay concerns that when such mergers occur they automatically lead to cutbacks in jobs.

A transgenerational study with female rats suggests that exposure to social stress not only impairs a mother's ability to care for her children but can also negatively impact her daughter's ability to provide maternal care to future offspring. 

Researchers at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University conducted examined the behavioral and physiological changes in mothers exposed to chronic social stress early in life as a model for postpartum depression and anxiety. 

Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are primarily cultural but the search is also on for a biological disposition that would confirm it outside primarily middle-class white girls in developed nations. Eating disorders are found in families but no genetic basis for predisposition has been identified.