According to one historian, the anti-government rallies that made their way across the country last summer, known as tea parties, may explain more about Americans than their views on high taxes and gun control.

 Ohio State University historian Randolph Roth claims that the distrust of government on display at the tea parties earlier this year has appeared sporadically throughout America's history and may be linked to homicide rates. In short, when Americans begin routinely complaining about how they hate their government and don't trust their leaders, they commit more murders.

Contrary to the widely held assumption that people use facebook and other social networking sites to make idealized impressions of themselves, a new psychology study suggests that facebook and myspace profiles are actually utilized for genuine social interaction and portray accurate personality images as a result.

To conduct the study, the researchers collected 236 profiles of college-aged people from the United States (facebook) and Germany (StudiVZ, SchuelerVZ). The researchers used questionnaires to assess the profile owners' actual personality characteristics as well as their
ideal-personality traits (how they wished to be). The personality traits included: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness.

The right kind of stress response in the operating room could lead to quicker recovery for patients after knee surgery, according to a new study published in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. The results could be used to develop methods for predicting how well patients will fare after they leave the hospital.

This isn't news anymore (see here, and here), but Bruce Alberts, Editor-in-Chief of Science has weighed in on the out-of-whack system of incentives in the biomedical sciences:

Our neurological structures are made mainly for survival; curiosity (a main tool for living) and its satisfaction are deeply inserted, by evolutionary genetics, into our central nervous system because of the need to find solutions to make sure survival. You can react in a rush moment like you never thought before, in order of the life maintenance, and until later think about the efficacy of your instinctive reaction. So our brain works to find solutions to the daily challenges of life, like most of the living species do so.