According to the National Institute of Mental Health, social anxiety disorder affects approximately 15 million American adults and is the third most common mental disorder in the United States, after depression and alcohol dependence.

The essential feature of the disorder is the fear of being evaluated by others, with the expectation that such an assessment will be negative and embarrassing. It tends to run a chronic and unremitting course and often leads to the development of alcoholism and depression. The disorder most often surfaces in adolescence or early adulthood, but it can occur at any time, including childhood.

Using single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), researchers in The Netherlands were able to detect biochemical differences in the brains of individuals with generalized social anxiety disorder (also known as social phobia), providing evidence of a long-suspected biological cause for the dysfunction.

A new study of possible links between climate and geophysics on Earth and similar planets finds that prolonged heating of the atmosphere can shut down plate tectonics and cause a planet's crust to become locked in place.

"The heat required goes far beyond anything we expect from human-induced climate change, but things like volcanic activity and changes in the sun's luminosity could lead to this level of heating," said lead author Adrian Lenardic, associate professor of Earth science at Rice University. "Our goal was to establish an upper limit of naturally generated climate variation beyond which the entire solid planet would respond."

Lenardic said the research team wanted to better understand the differences between the Earth and Venus and establish the potential range of conditions that could exist on Earth-like planets beyond the solar system.

There exists much ethical controversy brought about by advances in biology and medicine and the relationship to religion. In a new essay in The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, Laurie Zoloth takes an approach to medical ethics that draws upon Jewish texts, traditions, and philosophy to show how acting to change the world is indicative of this faith tradition.

Genetic explanations for how the natural world functions and why humans behave as we do can challenge what has historically been the moral province of religion: the questions of befalleness, suffering, healing. A question to be explored then is whether genetic enhancement of human capabilities, in addition to in their use in curing disease, is also a legitimate goal for biomedical science and technology.

Insects have provided the inspiration for a team of European researchers seeking to improve the functionality of robots and robotic tools.

The research furthers the development of more intelligent robots, which can then be used by industry, and by emergency and security services, among others. Smarter robots would be better able to find humans buried beneath the rubble of a collapsed building, for example.

The EU-funded SPARK project set out to develop a new robot control architecture for roving robots inspired by the principles governing the behavior of living systems and based on the concept of self-organization.

Everyone knows there is a lot of crazy stuff on the internet, but did you know there is a lot of great writing about genes, genetics, and human diseases? And believe it or not, sometimes these pieces are written by people who know what they're talking about. If you're looking for what's new in human genetics, you've come to the right place.

Welcome to the 31st Gene Genie, a blog carnival dedicated to great blogging about human genes and how they impact our health. This Mother's Day edition includes an in-depth highlight of the growing industry of personalized genetics.

Most female frogs don’t call; most lack or have only rudimentary vocal cords. A typical female selects a mate from a chorus of males and then –silently – signals her beau. But the female concave-eared torrent frog, Odorrana tormota, has a more direct method of declaring her interest:

She emits a high-pitched chirp that to the human ear sounds like that of a bird.

O. tormota lives in a noisy environment on the brushy edge of streams in the Huangshan Hot Springs, in central China, where waterfalls and rushing water provide a steady din. The frog has a recessed eardrum, said Albert Feng, a professor of molecular and integrative physiology at the University of Illinois and team leader on the new study.

In the world we know of only two species – the other one in southeast Asia – that have the concave ear,” Feng said. “The others all have eardrums on the body surface.”

Obesity is increasing in epidemic proportions in most countries and poses a public health problem by enhancing the risks for cardiovascular diseases and metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the prevalence of overweight and obesity has increased sharply for both adults and children since the 1970s. Data from two National Health and Nutrition Examination surveys show that among adults aged 20-74 years the prevalence of obesity increased from 15 percent (in the 1976-80 survey) to 32.9 percent (in the 2003-04 survey).

The two surveys also show increases in overweight children and teens. For children aged 2-5 years, the prevalence increased from 5 percent to 13.9 percent; for those aged 6-11 years, prevalence increased from 6.5 percent to 18.8 percent; and for those aged 12-19 years, prevalence increased from 5 percent to 17.4 percent.

In a new study discussed in Nature, a team has found that there is a direct correlation between the measures of fat mass (measured from body mass index (BMI) and fat cell volume in subcutaneous fat, which represents about 80 percent of all fat, and visceral fat.

Working at the University of Oxford and The Open University, Dr Lynne Cox and Dr Robert Saunders say they have found a fast and effective way to investigate important aspects of human aging.

Their discovery of a gene in fruit flies means they can now be used to study the effects aging has on DNA. The researchers demonstrate the value of this model in helping us to understand the critical aspects of human aging at cellular, genetic and biochemical levels.

Dr Lynne Cox from the University of Oxford said: "We study a premature human ageing disease called Werner syndrome to help us understand normal aging. The key to this disease is that changes in a single gene (called WRN) mean that patients age very quickly. Scientists have made great progress in working out what this gene does in the test tube, but until now we haven’t been able to investigate the gene to look at its effect on development and the whole body. By working on this gene in fruit flies, we can model human aging in a powerful experimental system."

At first, fruit flies eat like horses. Hatching inside over-ripe fruit where they were laid, they feed wildly in the sugar-rich environment until nature sends them an offer they can’t refuse. To survive, they must leave the fruit, wander off and burrow into the earth where they avoid food as if it were poison. Only then can the larvae grow and hatch into flies that will take wing to lay their own eggs.

Now, a team of researchers from the University of Georgia has discovered for the first time that the important developmental switch from food attraction to aversion in the fruit fly larva is controlled by a timing mechanism in the brain and its sensory system. The study shows how this important avoidance mechanism has been recruited into evolutionary processes to promote development and could one day lead to new methods of controlling pain in humans and other animals.

Fruit flies can’t really stay in the rotting fruit where they are laid. Not only do they risk drowning in the ripening fluid, they are increasingly exposed to harmful microorganisms that can kill them. To escape, the larvae “wander” out and burrow into the ground.

In a paper recently published in Cortex, Jan Lonnemann (RWTH Aachen University, Germany) and colleagues report that many children at the age of 8-9 years seem to represent numbers spatially. Interestingly, boys using this kind of representation tended to have better calculation abilities, while girls who represent numbers spatially tended to show poorer calculation abilities.

The authors assume that these differences may be due to gender-specific thinking styles: for boys, who may prefer visual-spatial thinking styles, it seems to be helpful to represent numbers spatially when being confronted with calculation problems, whereas for girls preferring verbal thinking styles it may be even detrimental.

Evidence for a connection between number and space processing comes from behavioral, patient, and brain imaging data, but only a few studies have addressed this issue in children.