The little voice inside your head telling you to eat that whole bag of Doritos is actually a cluster of about 10,000 specialized brain cells.

But there may be help in eating just one - the discovery of tiny 'triggers' inside those cells that give rise to this "voice", and keep it speaking throughout life. 

You'll have to take personal responsibility for a little while longer, the study was done in fish and mice, but it reveals how tiny bits of DNA can have a big influence on how the body regulates appetite and weight. It's the first documentation of exactly how a brain cell gene involved in weight regulation is controlled. 

A new study using stem cells derived from patients who have  Parkinson's disease (PD) has confirmed for the first time what scientists have long suspected - that the most common mutation linked to both sporadic and familial Parkinson's disease (PD) wreaks its havoc by altering the function of mitochondria in neurons that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine.

Mitochondria are energy-producing organelles found in large numbers in most cells and are necessary for life. Zeng says the Park2 mutation altered mitochondrial structure and function in dopamine producing neurons, causing them to die. Dopamine is an essential neurotransmitter which regulates movement and emotion.

If you want babies to learn faster, forget those "Baby Einstein" videos and defy their expectations a little. A new study has found  that babies learn new things by leveraging the core information they are born with.

When something surprises a baby, like an object not behaving the way a baby expects it to, the baby not only focuses on that object, but ultimately learns more about it than from a similar yet predictable object.

Multiple studies have indicated a link between high consumption of dairy products and a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes but a new study goes a step farther and finds that it is high-fat dairy products specifically that are associated with reduced risk. 

Those who ate the most high-fat dairy products had a 23 percent lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes than those who ate the least, according to the paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. That will make the National Dairy Council happy but the National Cattlemen's Beef Association won't be happy reading that high meat consumption was linked to an increased risk of type 2 diabetes regardless of the fat content of the meat.

A set of enigmatic quasar ghosts mark the graves of these objects that flickered to life and then faded.

8 unusual looped structures orbit their host galaxies and glow in a bright and eerie goblin-green hue. The ethereal wisps in these images were illuminated, perhaps briefly, by a blast of radiation from a quasar - a very luminous and compact region that surrounds a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy - and Hubble was there to catch it. 

The first object of this type was found in 2007 by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel participating in the Galaxy Zoo project, which catalogs the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The bizarre feature was dubbed Hanny's Voorwerp (Dutch for Hanny's object).

Patients with cancer often adopt lifestyle changes and those include being sold on the benefits of supplements, but there is growing concern about the use of supplements while taking anti-cancer drugs due to possible effect on treatment outcomes. 

A new study has found that consuming  three kinds of fish oils, as well as the fish herring and mackerel, raised blood levels of the fatty acid 16:4(n-3), which experiments in mice have found may induce resistance to chemotherapy used to treat cancer.

Stage IV cancer patients and their caregivers don't agree on the value of another year of life versus other end-of-life improvements.

Cancer is an expensive proposition emotionally and also financially. High-cost treatments may result in only moderate improvements in length or quality of life. Because such decisions are very difficult for patients to make, in some cases the decision is entirely deferred to a family caregiver.  

Alcoholism can not just ruin your life, it can shorten it - an average of 7.6 years shoter for those hospitalized compared to hospital patients without it, according to patient data from various general hospitals in Manchester, England.

The long-term observational study included a 12.5-year period. The researchers analyzed co-morbid physical illnesses of 23,371 hospital patients with alcohol dependence and compared them with those of a control group of 233,710 randomly selected patients without alcoholism. 

Type 2 diabetes is becoming increasingly widespread throughout the world and lifestyle habits, such as exercise and nutrition, are the biggest culprits.

Teaching any sort of academic program with religious content can be a tricky undertaking. Religious passions, whether pro or con, can be volatile; religion is a matter about which people can become upset.

My doctoral studies were in the relatively safe arena of Greek philosophy – no-one really cares what you say about Socrates and his mates these days – but I taught Religious Studies for many years and it was, by comparison, a minefield of sensitivities. In all those years, however, I managed to only really upset somebody once.