Domestic homicide is one of the most common and frequent types of murder in the U.S. but murderers who kill intimate partners and family members have a significantly different psychological and forensic profile from murderers who kill people they don't know.

One-third of all women murdered in the U.S. are killed by their male partners including husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends and ex-boyfriends. An estimated 25 percent of women will be victims of severe domestic violence by an intimate partner in their lifetimes, according to a new paper which which examined the demographics, psychiatric history and neuropsychology of these individuals.

Individuals who received the flu vaccine were protected for up to 6 months post-vaccination, the duration of most flu seasons, according to a study presented at the 2015 International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Each flu season, researchers work to find out how effective the flu vaccine was in order to measure its value as a health intervention. Factors such as age and health of an individual, as well the level of similarity between the flu virus and the flu vaccine can play a role in how well an influenza vaccine works.

"Few studies have assessed how quickly protection against influenza declines within a year following vaccination, specifically among US populations," said Dr. Jennifer Radin, at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, CA.

If you suffer from seasonal allergies, you are probably sick of it. So are allergy sufferers around the world. We can make a phone that could land a man on the Moon and create potatoes that don't brown but allergy solutions eluse us. 

When members of the U.S. military leave the service, they tend to settle in neighborhoods with greater overall diversity than their civilian counterparts of the same race, according to a new study that will be presented at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).

"It's encouraging that having served in the military appears to have a long-term impact on how people choose their neighborhoods," said study co-author Mary J. Fischer, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. "According to the social contact hypothesis, racial attitudes are improved and stereotypes are broken when diverse groups come together under circumstances that promote meaningful cross-group interaction, such as in the military."

In several years - in perhaps decades, or maybe never - our computers, nanoantennas and other kinds of equipment could operate on the base of photons, rather than electrons. Even now we are practically prepared to accomplish this switch. If it happens, the spheres studied by an international group of Russian, French and Spanish scientists will definitely be able to become one of the elementary components of new photonic devices.

In human cells, shortened telomeres, the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes, are both a sign of aging and contribute to it. Scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have found that the dietary supplement alpha lipoic acid (ALA) can stimulate telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens telomeres, with positive effects in a mouse model of atherosclerosis.

"Alpha-lipoic acid has an essential role in mitochondria, the energy-generating elements of the cell," says senior author Wayne Alexander, MD, PhD, professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. "It is widely available and has been called a 'natural antioxidant'. Yet ALA's effects in human clinical studies have been a mixed bag."

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration sent warning letters to Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co. and two others about using terms like "organic" and "natural"to imply healthier cigarettes. 

There is nothing healthier about organic or natural anything, it is just a marketing claim, though that has not stopped organic industry marketing groups and Whole Foods from suggesting their more expensive products are also better for you.

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation can help alleviate symptoms of autism, such as anxiety. AGUILA_JONATHAN/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

By Peter Enticott, Deakin University

Studies that deliberately exclude older adults from their samples render older adults' sexuality invisible. shutterstock

By Sue Malta, University of Melbourne

Want more working memory? Then you need to expand your brain. Credit: Flickr/Elena Gatti, CC BY

By Joel Pearson

Before we had mobile phones, people had to use their own memory to store long phone numbers (or write them down). But getting those numbers into long-term memory could be a real pain.