There are more men in hard science and engineering and there are a variety of explanations for why, everything from the sexism notion, promoted by those in the social sciences, to the idea that the physical sciences and engineering don't seem directly related to helping people, which is an explanation offered by women who choose a life science or medicine. One odd notion, typified by prominent friend of Obama Dr. Larry Summers while he was at Harvard, was that women were not as good at math.

Well-practiced motor skills like riding a bike are extremely stable memories that can be effortlessly recalled after years or decades. In contrast, a new study shows that changes to motor skill memories occurring over the course of a single practice session are not immediately stable, according to researchers.

We're all familiar with the old saying that you never forget how to ride a bike and perhaps personally familiar with riding off on a bike years after last putting pedals under your feet. This experience highlights the incredible stability possible for motor skill memories, especially those for well-practiced skills. However, the stability of the new motor memories formed on the shorter timescale of a single practice session has been under debate.

Sexual dysfunction in women can be linked to low resting heart rate variability, a finding that could help clinicians treat the condition, according to a study by psychologists from The University of Texas at Austin.

Heart rate variability (HRV) -- the variation in the time intervals between a person's consecutive heartbeats -- can indicate how well an individual responds to physiological and environmental changes. Low resting heart rate variability has been associated with several mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety and alcohol dependence, as well as erectile dysfunction in men.

The inclusion of experimenters who are unlikely to become habitual users in e-cigarette prevalence studies is of 'questionable' value for monitoring population public health trends, finds research published online in the journal Tobacco Control.

A more valid approach, setting the threshold at a minimum of use on 6 out of the past 30 days, would eliminate many of those who are motivated primarily by curiosity and unlikely to become regular users, and it would provide a more accurate picture of use, say the researchers.

A telecommunications law academic in Australia has recommended for laws to be enacted criminalising the application of face recognition technology to visual images online that enable the identity of a person or people to be ascertained without their consent.

The December 26th 2004 Mw ~9.2 Indian Ocean earthquake, also known as the Sumatra-Andaman or Aceh-Andaman earthquake and generated massive, destructive tsunamis, clearly demonstrated the need for a better understanding of how frequently subduction zone earthquakes and tsunamis occur. 

Using subsidence stratigraphy, a team traced the different modes of coastal sedimentation over the course of time in the eastern Indian Ocean where relative sea-level change evolved from rapidly rising to static from 8,000 years ago to the present day.

It's not a surprise that doctors may believe people obsessed with food - be they nocebos or migrating from fad to fad - have a psychological condition rather than a gastrointestinal one. The gluten obsession, where 75 percent of people without celiac disease claim they have a reaction to gluten but do not, is an example.

Another shooting, this time in a Charleston church, and another link to psychiatric drugs. Psychological disturbances caused by psychotropic drug treatment are a neglected problem, say therapists in a recent article. 

Up to 70% of patients with psychosis treated with antiserotoninergic second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs; clozapine, olanzapine and risperidone) develop secondary obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) or secondary obsessive-compulsive disorder (s-OCD), they write. The experts suggest two pharmacological strategies to treat s-OCD: a combination of antiserotoninergic SGAs with either dopaminergic SGAs (amisulpride and aripiprazole) or mood stabilizers (valproate or lamotrigine), and augmentation of SGAs with a serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SRI).

Researchers at the Université libre de Bruxelles, ULB uncover a new mechanism that regulates tumour initiation and invasion in skin basal cell carcinoma.

Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most common cancer found in human with several million of new patients affected every year around the world. The mechanisms that control BCC initiation and invasion are poorly known.

In a new study, researchers led by Pr. Cédric Blanpain, MD/PhD, professor and WELBIO investigator at the IRIBHM, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, report that Sox9, directly controls skin cancer formation by regulating the expansion of tumor initiating cells and the invasive properties of cancer cells.

Using ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft, scientists have identified more than a hundred patches of water ice a few meters in size on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta arrived at the comet in August 2014 at a distance of about 100 kilometers and eventually orbited the comet at 10 kilometers or less, allowing high-resolution images of the surface to be acquired.