There have been recent high-profile claims suggesting genetics and neuroscience are set to radically change the way we think about crime and punishment. Author Sam Harris, for example, argues that recent discoveries in neuroscience undermine our notion of free will, while Adrian Raine states there is a “biological basis also to recidivistic violent offending”.

But are our notions of blame and responsibility really heading for a revolution?

The extinct three-horned palaeomerycid ruminant, Xenokeryx amidalae, found in Spain, may be from the same clade as giraffes, according to a study published December 2, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Israel M. Sánchez from the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales-CSIC, Madrid, Spain, and colleagues.

A 13,000 year-old engraving uncovered in Spain may depict a hunter-gatherer campsite, according to a study published December 2, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Marcos García-Diez from University of the Basque Country, Spain, and Manuel Vaquero from Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution - IPHES, Spain.

Manuel Vaquero suggests that this "paleolithic engraving from northeastern Spain brings us the first representation of a human social group."

New research from of the Sexuality and Gender Laboratory at Queen's University shows that heterosexual women have more diverse patterns of sexual response than previously reported.

Research on women's sexual orientation and patterns of sexual response has previously focused on women's genital and subjective sexual arousal relative to their sexual identity, as heterosexual, bisexual or lesbian. Among women, however, there is significant diversity among women in their sexual attractions to other women and men, regardless of sexual identity. For example, a substantial minority of heterosexual women (20 per cent in some studies) also report some attraction to women.

PORTLAND, Ore., Dec. 4, 2015 -- A coordinated push to decrypt a complex form of leukemia is delivering a trove of new drug candidates and treatment ideas, a dozen of which will be presented at the American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida (Dec. 5-8).

The research initiative generating these leads, Beat AML, is led by the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University and The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). Beat AML brings together academic health centers and biopharmaceutical companies to accelerate discoveries that will improve outcomes for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a blood cancer lacking effective treatments. Less than 25 percent of newly diagnosed patients survive beyond five years.

Sometimes viruses do not attack right away, they instead find a way to enter the cells of the human body without tripping the alarm, and stay there without notice until it is time to strike. It’s how viruses in the herpesvirus family, like human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), do their business.

HCMV infects people at high rates all around the world. People with compromised or weakened immune systems are especially vulnerable. In newborn babies, the virus can cause deafness, intellectual disability and learning disorders. Other viruses in the herpesvirus family can cause cancer, shingles and mononucleosis. Once people are infected, they will have the virus their entire lives, due to its ability to cycle between latent and active states in the body.

There has long been evidence that lifestyles of parents could influence offspring - a parent who smokes or does drugs has a greater chance of having a child with a birth defect - but epigenetics is a brand new world of how choices can be passed through generations, because it says that the environment may affect how cells read genes instead of causing changes in the DNA sequence.

It isn't obvious that sign language, gestures to replace hearing words, would have regional dialects - accents - but it is so, according to Jami Fisher, a lecturer in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Linguistics, who is working on a project to document what they're calling the Philadelphia accent of this language.

What differentiates one region of American Sign Language from other such dialects? Why do those in the deaf community have an intuition that it's different? And how could scientists understand the regional variation?

PHILADELPHIA - For years, researchers have noted a tantalizing link between some neurologic conditions and certain species of the herpes virus. In patients with Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, and cerebellar ataxia, among other neuropathies, the cerebrospinal fluid teems with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). Yet, the nature of that link has remained unclear, as it has been assumed that EBV, as well as other viruses in the same sub-family, called gammaherpesviruses, cannot infect neurons.

The first mention of the bagel is in a 1610 text in a sumptuary law from the city of Krakow but in the late 19th century doughnut-shaped bread and smoked meat became popular in the New World thanks to successive waves of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Why did Jews take up bagels in the first place?

"The addition of other ingredients besides flour and water makes them something other than bread," explains Olivier Bauer, a professor at the University of Montreal's Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies. "So Kashrut allows Jews to buy them and eat them right away without performing the ritual blessing over bread."