Although they look normal, people suffering from body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) perceive themselves as ugly and disfigured. New imaging research reveals that the brains of people with BDD look normal, but function abnormally when processing visual details. The report in the December Archives of General Psychiatry is the first to demonstrate a biological reason for patients’ distorted body image.

“Our discovery suggests that the BDD brain’s hardware is fine, but there’s a glitch in the operating software that prevents patients from seeing themselves as others do,” explained Dr. Jamie Feusner, assistant professor of psychiatry at UCLA’s Semel Institute.

Subjects like physics, calculus and biology are challenging for most students, but imagine tackling these topics without being able to see the graphs and figures used to teach them. A new smartpen and paper technology that works with touch and records classroom audio aims to bring these subjects to life for blind students.

“Mainstream approaches to teaching STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) courses all rely strongly on diagrams, graphs, charts and other figures, putting students with visual disabilities at a significant disadvantage,” Andy Van Schaack, lecturer in Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of education and human development, said.

New research from a lab at Florida State University reveals that self-control takes fuel — literally. When we exercise it, resisting temptations to misbehave, our fuel tank is depleted, making subsequent efforts at self-control more difficult.

Florida State psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and his colleagues Kathleen D. Vohs, University of Minnesota, and Dianne M. Tice, Florida State, showed this with an experiment using the Stroop task, a famous way of testing strength of self-control. Participants in this task are shown color words that are printed in different-colored ink (like the word red printed in blue font), and are told to name the color of the ink, not the word.

Why does it take so long for soul mates to find each other? How does disease spread through a person’s body? When will the next computer virus attack your hard-drive?

A new theory published last month in Nature on the statistical concept of “First Passage Time,” or FPT, may provide the key to answering at least a few of these questions, says theory co-author Prof. Joseph Klafter from Tel Aviv University’s School of Chemistry. And the answers may lead to breakthroughs in medicine, mathematics, the environment, and elsewhere.

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Perhaps the first stars in the newborn universe did not shine, but instead were invisible “dark stars” 400 to 200,000 times wider than the sun and powered by the annihilation of mysterious dark matter, a University of Utah study concludes.

Young chimpanzees have an “extraordinary” ability to remember numerals that is superior to that of human adults, according to a report in the December 4th issue of Current Biology.

“There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions,” said Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University. “No one can imagine that chimpanzees—young chimpanzees at the age of five—have a better performance in a memory task than humans. Here we show for the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection—better than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus, following the same procedure.”