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.”

Boosting an exercise-related gene in the brain works as a powerful anti-depressant in mice—a finding that could lead to a new anti-depressant drug target, according to a Yale School of Medicine report in Nature Medicine.

“The VGF exercise-related gene and target for drug development could be even better than chemical antidepressants because it is already present in the brain,” said Ronald Duman, professor of psychiatry and senior author of the study.

Depression affects 16 percent of the population in the United States, at a related cost of $83 billion each year. Currently available anti-depressants help 65 percent of patients and require weeks to months before the patients experience relief.

A multidisciplinary team of UCLA scientists were able to differentiate metastatic cancer cells from normal cells in patient samples using leading-edge nanotechnology that measures the softness of the cells.

The study in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, represents one of the first times researchers have been able to take living cells from cancer patients and apply nanotechnology to analyze them and determine which were cancerous and which were not. The nano science measurements may provide a potential new method for detecting cancer, especially in cells from body cavity fluids where diagnosis using current methods is typically very challenging. The method also may aid in personalizing treatments for patients.