Mothers who practiced responsive parenting -- including reacting promptly and appropriately to hunger and fullness cues -- were less likely to have overweight babies at their one-year checkup than those who did not, say health researchers.

Parents should expect infants to triple their birth weight by their first birthday, but some babies gain weight more quickly than others. This rapid weight gain is associated with risk for becoming obese later in life.

"Over 20 percent of 2- to 5-year-olds in the U.S. are already overweight," said Ian M. Paul, professor of pediatrics and public health sciences, Penn State College of Medicine. "This highlights the need to start interventions early in life."

Boys high in cognitive empathy attracted an average of 1.8 more girl friendships than low empathy counterparts, as revealed by a landmark study - When Empathy Matters: The Role of Sex and Empathy in Close Friendships.

The Australian Research Council-funded research, led by Professor Joseph Ciarrochi at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education at Australian Catholic University, has been published in the Journal of Personality.

It is the first study to examine the extent that adolescent males and females select empathic classmates as friends. And the conclusion based on a study of 1,970 Year 10 students in Queensland and New South Wales (average age of 15.7 years) is that girls are more likely to nominate empathic boys as friends.

A team of researchers belonging to the Prehistory Area of the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country has published the results of its recent investigations in the San Cristóbal Rock-shelter (Sierra de Cantabria. Laguardia. Álava, Basque Country). This is the first time that empirical data have been presented and which demonstrate the use of rock-shelters as enclosures (for sheep/goats) by agropastoral communities from the early Chacolithic onwards (about 5,000 years ago) in the area of the Basque Country and throughout the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula.

Researchers and clinicians from hospitals and universities from many countries have collaborated to better understand diseases of platelets -- the little cells that help blood to clot. They have developed a more effective, comprehensive and cheaper panel of genetic tests that are already being used to benefit both patients and the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK.

Development of the test is described in the journal Blood, published in print on Thursday June 09, 2016.

How many medals will each country win in Rio at this Summer's Olympic Games? Researchers who derived predictions from two different models anticipate that the USA, China, Russia, and the UK will retain their top positions in the medals ranking, but Brazil and Japan are expected to make the biggest gains.

As described in a new Significance article, the first model primarily describes a country's medals as a function of the number of medals won at the previous Olympic Games, and the second model includes additional socio-economic variables.

The move from life on land to life in the sea has led to the evolution of a new sense for sea snakes, a University of Adelaide-led study suggests.

The international team, led by researchers in the University's School of Biological Sciences, studied tiny and poorly understood structures on the heads of snakes called 'scale sensilla'. The research has been published in the Royal Society journal Open Biology.

"Land snakes and many lizards have small raised structures on the scales on their heads -- called scale sensilla -- that they use to sense objects by direct touch," says lead author Jenna Crowe-Riddell, University of Adelaide PhD student.

A new study reports on the results of a randomized clinical trial that looked at whether the antidepressant citalopram would enhance complicated grief treatment psychotherapy, and if citalopram would be efficacious without it in an article published online by JAMA Psychiatry.

Complicated grief occurs in about 7 percent of bereaved individuals and it is characterized by persistent maladaptive thoughts, dysfunctional behaviors and poorly regulated emotions that interfere with the ability to adapt to loss. Co-occurring depressive symptoms are common but complicated grief is clearly differentiated from major depression.

While American news media speculates about how much of Omar Mateen's motivation for his attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando was due to Muslim beliefs and how much was due to anti-gay sentiment, the ease with which someone can enter soft targets has renewed concern about the Euro 2016 soccer tournament in France, especially after the lack of domestic intelligence made it relatively easy for November’s terrorist attacks on the Stade de France and the January 2015 shootings at Charlie Hebdo.

When anti-science activists set out to drive astronomy from the state of Arizona by trumping up an environmental hazard, they were failing to prevent a problem that would creep across many places that don't want space science in their neighborhood - light pollution.

Scientists have shown how the brain anticipates all of the new situations that it may encounter in a lifetime by creating a special kind of neural network that is "pre-adapted" to face any eventuality. This emerges from a new neuroscience study published in PLOS Computational Biology.

Enel et al at the INSERM in France investigate one of the most noteworthy properties of primate behavior, its diversity and adaptability. Human and non-human primates can learn an astonishing variety of novel behaviors that could not have been directly anticipated by evolution -- we now understand that this ability to cope with new situations is due to the "pre-adapted" nature of the primate brain.