You study the menu at a restaurant and decide to order the steak rather than the salmon. But when the waiter tells you about the lobster special, you decide lobster trumps steak. Without reconsidering the salmon, you place your order—all because of a trait called “transitivity.”

“Transitivity is the hallmark of rational economic choice,” says Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, a postdoctoral researcher in HMS Professor of Neurobiology John Assad’s lab. According to transitivity, if you prefer A to B and B to C, then you ought to prefer A to C. Or, if you prefer lobster to steak, and steak to salmon, then you will prefer lobster to salmon.

Some anti-drinking advertising campaigns may be “catastrophically misconceived” because they play on the entertaining ‘drinking stories’ that young people use to mark their social identity, say researchers who have just completed a three year study of the subject.

Adverts that show drunken incidents, such as being thrown out of a nightclub, being carried home or passing out in a doorway, are often seen by young people as being a typical story of a ‘fun’ night out, rather than as a cautionary tale.

Whilst these adverts, such as Diageo’s thechoiceisyours campaign, imply that being very drunk with friends carries a penalty of social disapproval, for many young people the opposite is often the case.

While the biological basis for homosexuality remains a mystery, a team led by University of Illinois at Chicago researcher David Featherstone has discovered that sexual orientation in fruit flies is controlled by a previously unknown regulator of synapse strength.

Armed with this knowledge, the researchers found they were able to use either genetic manipulation or drugs to turn the flies' homosexual behavior on and off within hours.

Featherstone, associate professor of biological sciences at UIC, and his coworkers discovered a gene in fruit flies they called "genderblind," or GB. A mutation in GB turns flies bisexual.

One gene for pea pod color generates green pods while a variant of that gene gives rise to the yellow-pod phenotype, a feature that helped Gregor Mendel, the 19th century Austrian priest and scientist, first describe genetic inheritance. However, many modern-day geneticists are focused on the strange ability of some genes to be expressed spontaneously in either of two possible ways.

In order to better understand this phenomenon of epigenetic multistability, a major complication for Mendelian genetics, scientists at UC San Diego grew virtual bacterial cells in a computer experiment. They created a two-phenotype model system programmed to grow in ways that matched natural growth.

Policy makers, employers and others can use the science of behavioral economics to steer people toward wiser choices — and dramatically improve their health — without limiting their freedom to do as they please, according to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The paper was written by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pennsylvania, Aetna Inc. and the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

This approach can counter one of the underlying causes of major health problems in the United States and other developed nations — bad decision-making on the part of individuals. Tobacco use, obesity and alcohol abuse account for nearly one-third of all deaths in the United States.

A new study by a Penn State College of Medicine research team found that honey may offer parents an effective and safe alternative than over the counter children's cough medicines.

The study found that a small dose of buckwheat honey given before bedtime provided better relief of nighttime cough and sleep difficulty in children than no treatment or dextromethorphan (DM), a cough suppressant found in many over-the-counter cold medications.

Honey did a better job reducing the severity, frequency and bothersome nature of nighttime cough from upper respiratory infection than DM or no treatment. Honey also showed a positive effect on the sleep quality of both the coughing child and the child’s parents. DM was not significantly better at alleviating symptoms than no treatment.