Mutations within the gene FTO have been implicated as a genetic determinant of obesity risk in humans, but the mechanism for any link remains unknown.

A new paper says that the obesity-associated elements within FTO interact with IRX3, a distant gene on the genome that appears to be the functional obesity gene. The FTO gene itself appears to have only a peripheral effect on obesity. 

Vibrations in chemical bonds can be used to predict chemical reactions. That means chemists could design better catalysts to speed reactions that make medicines, industrial products and new materials.

Cell metabolism is a crucial biological function for all living organisms but understanding how life may have emerged is difficult. And learning some answers may make it possible to learn whether it is possible for life to have emerged in similar environments on other worlds. 

Researchers writing in Astrobiology
detail their new approach to simulating the energetic processes that may have led to the emergence of cell metabolism.

Dr. Terry Kee from the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds, one of the co-authors of the research paper, said, "What we are trying to do is to bridge the gap between the geological processes of the early Earth and the emergence of biological life on this planet."

While there's no genetic basis for anorexia nervosa, psychiatrists say there may be a chemical treatment - oxytocin, the 'love hormone'.  

Robin Thicke may have sung "Blurred Lines" and appeared in a teenage fantasy video with a lot of naked women, but when a photo was revealed of him in a suggestive situation with another woman, he found that the line was actually not all that blurry to his wife.(1)

What changed? She had been fine with his canoodling before. He has no idea and men meeting women across the nation are just as confused about where their blurred lines are. 

Linguists have conducted what they call an evolutionary analysis to the relationship between North American and Central Siberian languages and say the results indicate that people moved out from the Bering Land Bridge, with some migrating back to central Asia and others into North America.

A 70 million year old fossil found in the Late Cretaceous sediments of Alaska reveals a new small tyrannosaur named Nanuqsaurus hoglundi.  

The team of Francesca Ferlaino, Institute for Experimental Physics of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, has experimentally shown chaotic behavior of particles in a quantum gas. "For the first time we have been able to observe quantum chaos in the scattering behavior of ultracold atoms," says an excited Ferlaino. The physicists used random matrix theory to confirm their results, thus asserting the universal character of this statistical theory. Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner formulated random matrix theory to describe complex systems in the 1950s. Although interactions between neutrons with atomic nuclei were not well-known then, Wigner was able to reliably predict properties of complex spectra by using random matrices.

Can you catch a mood from someone online? Most people would answer 'yes', because lots of comments on the Internet enrage them.

A political science paper says they can confirm it.

After a 30-year search, scientists have uncovered how an enzyme critical to plants' rapid immune response against microbes is activated.

"The insights will open up new ways to improve disease resistance and stress tolerance in plants," says Professor Cyril Zipfel of The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich.

The enzyme, the NAPDH oxidase RBOHD, triggers a rapid generation of signalling molecules derived from oxygen that are believed to be detrimental to microbial growth. The newly-discovered way this enzyme is activated, by a protein (called BIK1) fills a gap in how plants perceive a threat and how signals are activated to trigger an immune response.