Can your online avatar say something about your personality that you haven't carefully chosen to be your public representation? It might say that some people are cats, or, since 85 percent of the female avatars of massively multiplayer online games are actually males, it might say that MMO participants have identity issues, but that does not mean it is so.

Nonetheless, psychologists at York University wanted to determine what personality traits are conveyed by a user's avatar - based on the belief that individuals typically choose and prefer avatars perceived to be similar to themselves.  Other studies claim they were who we want to be.

After a wildfire burns a large swath across timberlands, logging companies come in to do salvage logging - they clean up the timber that has not been completely destroyed by the fire. It's a good idea to get economic benefit from devastated land and otherwise it is just rotting tinder for the next fire.

Environmentalists, who object to even the most basic forest management in order to prevent fires, hate logging - even after a fire has burned the place down. They have been raising the alarm about salvage logging because the ecological effects are...unknown.

As World War II ended and the Holocaust became shockingly more real than the rumor or propaganda some believed it was, people wondered how it could happen. Why, somewhere along the way, did not more Germans involved in the genocide object? The same was asked of Stalin's Russia, Mao's China and Pol Pot's Cambodia.

In 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram set out to answer that, undertaking a series of now infamous experiments on obedience and reprehensible behavior. About two-thirds of Milgram's nearly 800 study subjects, pressed by an authoritative experimenter, were willing to administer increasingly powerful electric shocks to an unseen stranger despite cries of agony and pleas to stop.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection has gotten a lot of attention. It is caused by a strain of staph bacteria that's become resistant to the antibiotics commonly used to fight it, but antibiotic resistance is not new. For as long as antibiotics have been manufactured (and nature shows evidence of it well before that) resistance evolves. 

Science has to stay a step ahead in the interests of public health and a new paper details a newly discovered antibiotic that eliminates pathogens without encountering any detectable resistance, which holds great promise for treating chronic infections like tuberculosis and those caused by MRSA. 

An affordable vaccine that has all but rid the 'meningitis belt' of a major cause of deadly epidemics is now going to be available for infants all across sub-Saharan Africa. 

Academic wizardry. Shutterstock

By Nick Butler, Lund University and Sverre Spoelstra, Lund University

Northern Europeans pride themselves on being tougher than the rest of Europe when it comes to enduring weather. While most people are more likely to die in bad weather, a new paper finds that Norwegian kids were more likely to die when the weather was good.

By studying church records from 1750 to 1900 and looking at life history variables, such as how old women were when they had their first child and their last and how many years passed between the birth of each child and how many of these children survived, Gine Roll Skjaervoe at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Biology made a strange finding - kids born in years with a lot of sunshine died more, and that meant fewer grandchildren. 

A paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine links circumcision in boys to autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

The results were drawn from part a cohort of all children born in Denmark between 1994 and 2003. During the study, over 340,000 boys were followed up to the age of nine between 1994 and 2013 and almost 5,000 cases of ASD were diagnosed. They found that regardless of cultural background circumcised boys may run a greater risk of developing ASD. The researchers also made the observation of an increased risk of hyperactivity disorder among circumcised boys in non-Muslim families.  Risk was particularly high for infantile autism before the age of five, at least in epidemiology.  

Hypertension - high blood pressure - affects up to 80 million people in the United States and cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death so lowering blood pressure has the potential to save lives.

For most people, exercise and diet are enough and a new study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics finds that daily consumption of blueberries for eight weeks resulted in significant reductions of both systolic and diastolic blood pressure.

Can cancer biopsies spread more cancer? Some patients, and a few doctors think so. 

Fine needle aspiration is a minimally invasive technique that uses a thin and hollow needle to extract a few cells from a tumor mass. Some contend that a biopsy can cause some cancer cells to spread and it has become a strongly-held belief, but is it true?

It came about because some people who got biopsies did have cancer spread but it was so rare that answers were difficult to find. A recent study of more than 2,000 patients by researchers at Mayo Clinics concludes it is a myth and that patients who received a biopsy had a better outcome and longer survival than patients who did not have a biopsy.