Gifted youths already know what they want to be when they grow up - in a lot of cases it's applied sciences, but when they are asked why they made their choices, they are not able to explain.

A study surveyed 800 gifted and non-gifted high-school students and examined the differences in self-concept and other psychological variables between the two groups. The study also observed the ways in which maturing gifted students form their identity. The results showed that while gifted youths have higher self-esteem in their educational achievements, they have lower self-esteem in social and physical aspects.

In a study in the latest issue of European Journal of Neuroscience, an interdisciplinary Northwestern research team says they have found biological evidence that musical training enhances an individual's ability to recognize emotion in sound. 

The study found that the more years of musical experience musicians possessed and the earlier the age they began their music studies also increased their nervous systems' abilities to process emotion in sound.

Despite the increased popularity of geek culture – movies based on comic books, videogames, virtual worlds – and the ubiquity of computers, the geek's close cousin, the nerd, still suffers from a negative stereotype in popular culture. This may help explain why women and minorities are increasingly shying away from careers in information technology, says Lori Kendall, a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The popular stereotype of the nerd as the sartorially challenged, anti-social white male hasn't faded from our collective cultural consciousness, and is more prevalent than ever as a stock character in television shows, movies and advertisements.

The helpless behavior that is commonly linked to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is preceded by stress-related losses of synapses—microscopic connections between brain cells—in the brain’s hippocampal region, researchers at Yale School of Medicine report in Biological Psychiatry. 
 
The team used a six-day treatment with the antidepressant desipramine to reverse helpless behavior and restore hippocampal synapses in rats. 
 

Economics is always called the dismal science, because it has science pretensions yet never makes accurate predictions.   The outlook, according to economists, is always rather bleak.

But given the current state of the economy, economists are downright ecstatic, because they can be relevant again.  And, in this case, it turns out they are a lot more optimistic than unemployed people are about the future.

You know when economists are cheery things must be pretty bad.   

The hot buzz word in the health care reform sector is "comparative effectivness research," and the lay press is picking up on the partisan rumblings in Washington over this provision in the recent stimulus legislation. But what is CE research, and why should we care about the minutiae involved in the bickering of a bunch of Washington politicians?

In fact, we should care very much, as it could change the way physicians practice medicine and consumers use health care.

It’s been a while since Popeye taught us to eat our spinach; vegetables are due for a makeover.  “Whatever sparks their imagination seems to spark their appetite,” says Cornell researcher Colin Payne of a new study led by Brian Wansink of Cornell’s Food and Branding lab.  This research shows that children eat significantly more vegetables when their food has been excitingly renamed.

If you are a side-blotched lizard (Uta stansburiana), then you have an orange, a yellow or a blue throat (easily determined by looking in mirror). If your throat is orange, then you are a big, bad machine and will easily kick the ass of anyone with a blue throat and steal his lady lizards. Ah yeah.

If your throat is blue, you are a wuss but not a complete wuss, and can still defend your women against the über-wussy yellow-throats.

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have gained new insights about the atmosphere of Pluto - (it's a dwarf now, get over it.)

What stands out?   Large amounts of methane in the atmosphere and it's hotter than the surface by about 40 degrees, though -180 degrees Celsius is still not the place for your interplanetary tropical vacation. These properties of Pluto's atmosphere may be due to the presence of pure methane patches or of a methane-rich layer covering the dwarf planet's surface.

Astronomers using a telescope aboard the NASA Swift Satellite have captured information from the early stages of a gamma ray burst - the most violent and luminous explosions occurring in the Universe since the Big Bang.

Swift is able to both locate and point at gamma ray bursts (GRBs) far quicker than any other telescope, so by using its Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) the astronomers were able to obtain an ultraviolet spectrum of a GRB just 251 seconds after its onset - the earliest ever captured. Further use of the instrument in this way will allow them to calculate the distance and brightness of GRBs within a few hundred seconds of their initial outburst, and gather new information about the causes of bursts and the galaxies they originate from.