According to lore (because apparently before the Internet, if it appeared in writing it had to be true) diarist Samual Pepes originally said, "Laughter is the best medicine."

On a science site, we are inclined to note that 'medicine is the best medicine' - but studies have shown that laughter can't hurt ... and it may help.

How many times have you had some pithy comment in prose be misinterpreted when you just know that if the other people could simply hear your voice or see your face they would know how brilliant you are?

It happens a lot and emoticons, along with their evil cousin ALL CAPITALIZATION AND !!! PUNCTUATION, were invented to try and close the communications gap.  

Now European researchers at the PASION project have developed a suite of tools to add non-verbal cues to email, phone calls, chats and other channels of electronic communication.   Digital communication hasn’t the richness of face-to-face conversation because it cannot communicate the non-verbal cues and contextual information that are so important to us all.

Women get more knee injuries than men and new research from the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary say there may be a connection between the laxity of a woman's knee joint and her monthly hormone cycle.

The research project — a collaboration between kinesiology, engineering and health sciences researchers — has found that not all woman experience knee laxity at the same time of their menst rual cycle. The researchers speculate that this is likely why previous research in the area has largely discounted a connection between the hormone cycle and knee injury.

The most crowded collision of galaxy clusters has been identified by combining information from three different telescopes. This result gives scientists a chance to learn what happens when some of the largest objects in the Universe go at each other in a cosmic free-for-all.

Using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, astronomers were able to determine the three-dimensional geometry and motion in the system MACSJ0717.5+3745 (or MACSJ0717 for short) located about 5.4 billion light years from Earth.

What's different about nocturnal mammals that have 'night vision'?  According to a Cell report, the DNA within the photoreceptor rod cells responsible for low light vision is packaged in a very unconventional way.   That special DNA architecture turns the rod cell nuclei themselves into tiny light-collecting lenses, with millions of them in every nocturnal eye.

There's a perception among some that it's a man's world and they get all the attention.   If you've ever been in a bar or a library or a baseball game, you know this is not true - have a woman drop a napkin and see what happens whereas a man could be bleeding out his eyes and be unnoticed.   But women want to keep men on their toes by pretending they are in charge.

Now the gig may be up, thanks to biology.   

University of California, Berkeley biologist Doris Bachtrog and her colleagues say that the history of the X chromosome offers important clues to the origins and benefits of sexual reproduction.     X even compensates for the degeneration of Y, which will get people talking.

Take that,  much-studied male-determining Y chromosome.