A new study says sodium nitrate, like you get if you eat plenty of vegetables, reverses features of metabolic syndrome in mice.   

Metabolic syndrome is the list of risk factors of metabolic origin that increase likelihood of getting cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

As obesity has increased, and the number of people with metabolic syndrome right along with it, various attempts have been made to identify a common underlying molecular mechanism for metabolic syndrome.   One group has pointed to a defect in endogenous synthesis and bioavailability of nitric oxide (NO) and their new study says one contributing issue in metabolic syndrome is a decrease in the amount of nitric oxide from endothelial NO synthase (eNOS).

We know people have positive social behavior in part because of emotional reactions to real or imagined social harm  - we may not like seeing others slighted or we may not want to be perceived as the kind of person who does that sort of thing.

But some are a lot more sensitive than others and a new study says that the neurotransmitter serotonin can directly alter both moral judgment and behavior through increasing our aversion to personally harming others, rather than just controlling violent impulses or helping you sleep.

Ronald Fisher, evolutionary biologist and statistician who introduced the method of maximum likelihood and the fiducial interval into life sciences, said basically that the more complex a plant or animal is, the more difficulty it should have adapting to changes in the environment. 

But there are well-adapted, complex organisms, orchids, humans, you name it, and confusion about 'cost of complexity' offers ammunition to proponents of Creationism, who hold that  intricacy could only arise only through the efforts of a divine designer and not natural selection. 

Unable to exercise?   Some new research may be hope in keeping muscles from atrophy.   Researchers from Stanford University have shown how to use light to induce muscle contraction.

But don't cancel your gym membership just yet.  The study used bioengineered mice whose nerve-cell surfaces were coated with special light-sensitive proteins.

They used a technology known as optogenetics, which involves the insertion of a specialized gene derived from algae into the genomes of experimental animals. This gene encodes a light-sensitive protein that situates itself on nerve-cell surfaces. Particular wavelengths of light can trigger nerve activity in animals endowed with these proteins, modifying nerve cells' firing patterns at the experimenters' will.

'Flow', or the 'flow state', refers to what you might know as being 'in the zone'. It is that state where you are wrapped up in the activity that you are doing, so much so that you are 'one' with it (in the sense of being fully engaged that is; not a strange zen thing).

The main researcher of flow is the delightfully unpronounceable Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Chick-sent-me-high). Generally it is associated with more intrinsic motication for the activity in question, and although you lose sense of yourself and time while you are in flow, you are said to return with a stronger sense of self afterwards.

Conceptualisation of Flow

Did you find yesterday's personalized horoscope spookily accurate? Isn't it amazing how precisely the websites you visit allow description of who you are?

In fact (as many of you guessed), it's a trick.

The Large Hadron Collider is increasing gradually the number of proton bunches that circulate in the machine. Yesterday's fill saw 104 colliding proton bunches,  producing the record instantaneous luminosity of 3.5 x 10^31 collisions per square centimeter per second. This is no surprise, of course: luminosity is essentially the product of the number of particles crossing each other per second divided by the cross section of the beams, so if you increase the particles and manage to keep the beam transverse size constant, luminosity must go up.

Hitler gets a bad rap universally for his genocide but a startling subset of progressives in America view Joseph Stalin favorably despite his killing more people.  Time magazine put Stalin on its cover 11 times.  Then Rwanda, Cambodia and Darfur were essentially ignored while Bosnia was labeled genocide and became a war crime issue despite only a few thousand actual deaths known.

Nations have tugs of war over the official definition of the word 'genocide' itself – which mentions only national, ethnic, racial and religious groups. The definition can determine international relations, foreign aid and national morale.