Political scientists from the University of Missouri say that the general public knows very little about foreign policy, and what they do know is based primarily on "rhetoric" from whatever president occupies the White House.

They also suggest that plainly stated, easy-to-understand foreign policy explanations from presidential administrations are likely to receive public support, while complicated, convoluted policy explanations are likely to face greater public skepticism. The findings are published in Political Research Quarterly.

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.

Religious people say their belief in a personal god functions as a moral compass, helping them form opinions about controversial issues and distinguish right from wrong. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, suggests that it's just the opposite; people attribute whatever they happen to believe to god.

 According to a new study soon to appear in NeuroImage, active cocaine abusers were, on average, able to suppress activity in brain regions linked to drug cravings when asked to inhibit their response to a "cocaine-cues" video.

The findings suggest that clinical interventions designed to strengthen these inhibitory responses could help cocaine abusers stop using drugs and avoid relapse.

Scientists used a brain-scanning technique called positron emission tomography (PET) and a radioactively "tagged" form of glucose — the brain's main fuel — to measure brain activity in 24 active cocaine abusers during three different conditions: 1) while subjects simply lay

Men could soon have the same control over their fertility that women have had since the 1960s, according to a new paper published in the December 2009 issue of The FASEB Journal. The authors of the paper say they have found how and where androgenic hormones work in the testis to control normal sperm production and male fertility.

The discovery was the result of studies performed in two groups of mice. The first group of mice was normal, but the second was missing a gene from the peritubular myoid cells in the testis. This missing gene codes for the androgen hormone receptor, and when missing, sperm production was significantly decreased when compared to the normal group. The result was infertility.

If you think the stress you experience during the holidays is doing you harm, you're right. Scientists from the University of Connecticut and Yale University say that entertaining your in-laws or traveling long distances this time of year can make you sick, and they they know why.

According to their study published in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, the same part of our nervous system that is responsible for the fight-or-flight response (called the sympathetic nervous system) also controls regulatory T cells, which are used by the body to end an immune response once a foreign invader has been removed or destroyed.